Children's Perspectives on Domestic Violence

Children’s Perspectives on Domestic Violence

Children’s Perspectives on Domestic Violence Audrey Mullender Gill Hague Umme Imam Liz Kelly Ellen Malos Linda Regan

SAGE Publications

London • Thousand Oaks • New Delhi

© Audrey Mullender, Gill Hague, Umme Imam, Liz Kelly, Ellen Malos and Linda Regan 2002 First published 2002 Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, this publication may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form, or by any means, only with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction, in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Inquiries concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the publishers. SAGE Publications Ltd 6 Bonhill Street London EC2A 4PU SAGE Publications Inc. 2455 Teller Road Thousand Oaks, California 91320 SSAGE Publications India Pvt Ltd B-42, Panchsheel Enclave Post Box 4109 New Delhi 110 017 British Library Cataloguing in Publication data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 0 7619 7105 X ISBN 0 7619 7106 8 (pbk) Library of Congress Control Number: 2002103334

Typeset by C&M Digitals (P) Ltd., Chennai, India Printed and bound in Great Britain by Athenaeum Press, Gateshead

Contents

About the authors

vii

Acknowledgements

xi

Chapter 1 Children in Their Own Issue: a Shift of Approach

1

Chapter 2 Researching with Children on a Sensitive Topic

22

Chapter 3 What Children Know and Understand about Domestic Violence

44

Chapter 4 Children’s Experiences of Living with Domestic Violence

91

Chapter 5 Children’s Coping Strategies

117

Chapter 6 Barriers of Racism, Ethnicity and Culture

132

Chapter 7 The Influence of Domestic Violence on Relationships between Children and Their Mothers

156

Chapter 8 Life with a Violent Father

178

Chapter 9 Listening to the Children: The Way Ahead

206

Appendix Children’s Advice to Other Children about Coping with Domestic Violence

233

Bibliography

241

Index

255

About the Authors

Audrey Mullender is Professor of Social Work at the University of Warwick where she chairs both the School of Health and Social Studies and the Faculty of Social Studies and directs the Centre for the Study of Safety and Well-being (SWELL). She has over twenty years’ experience of teaching social work, prior to which her background was in the statutory social services. She is the immediate past Editor of the British Journal of Social Work and has herself produced well over a hundred publications in the social work field, including more than a dozen books. Notable amongst these are: Children Living with Domestic Violence: Putting Men’s Abuse of Women on the Child Care Agenda (edited jointly with Rebecca Morley and published in 1994 by Whiting and Birch) and Rethinking Domestic Violence: The Social Work and Probation Response (published in 1996 by Routledge). Her research has spanned women’s issues in domestic violence and responses to perpetrators as well as services for children. In 2000, she was elected to the Academy of Learned Societies for the Social Sciences and she is a member of the Sociology, History, Anthropology and Resources College (SHARe) of the ESRC. Gill Hague is the Joint Co-ordinator of, and a Senior Research Fellow in, the Domestic Violence Research Group of the School for Policy Studies at the University of Bristol. This group conducts national and international studies of domestic violence and offers wide-ranging consultancy, teaching and training on the issue, working broadly alongside the major practitioner organisations in the field and Women’s Aid in particular. She holds professional qualifications in social work and in pre-school education, as well as a doctorate in social policy. She has worked on violence against women issues for nearly 30 years as an activist and has specialized in the issue as an academic since 1990. Overall, she has 20 years’ experience as a social worker and has worked in academic teaching and research since the 1980s. She has written extensively on violence against women, as well as on other subjects, and, with Ellen Malos, is recognised as an authority on multi-agency work and domestic violence. Her publications include the popular overview book with Ellen Malos, Domestic Violence: Action for Change (second edition, Cheltenham: New Clarion Press, 1998) and many widely-read reports, papers and government briefing notes on the inter-agency approach. She has also written on the views and voices of abused women, and on children’s issues, historical perspectives, international responses and housing issues, all in specific relation to domestic violence. Recent collaborative work (some with other authors of this book) includes research for the British Council, the ESRC, the Joseph Rowntree Foundation and the Home Office.

viii Children’s Perspectives on Domestic Violence

Umme Farvah Imam is Head of Community and Youth Work Studies at the University of Durham, specializing in issues concerned with race and gender. Born and educated in India, she was formerly employed at Roshni, Asian Women’s Association, Newcastle upon Tyne, and was a co-founder of Panah, the black women’s refuge there. She has been active for over a decade on wider issues of preventing and responding to the abuse of women and children in the black and Asian communities. She is one of a tiny number of minority ethnic women in Britain combining this particular professional and community involvement with related academic research interests focusing on domestic violence, particularly its impact on children and young people. She is currently drawing on British and South Asian literature to conceptualize the impact of abuse in the lives of young Asian women, and is forging links with academics and women’s organizations in India for future research activity on this topic. Her publications include ‘Asian children and domestic violence’ in Mullender, A. and Morley, R. (eds) Children Living with Domestic Violence (London: Whiting and Birch, 1994) and ‘Training Black Women in Newcastle upon Tyne’ in Training European Women: A Study of NOW Projects in Four European Cities (NOW joint Evaluation Project, Newcastle upon Tyne, 1995). She was co-editor of the ‘Black Perspectives’ issue of Youth and Policy (49: 1995). She has presented at national and international conferences on her range of interests, including in a workshop at the major conference on children living with woman abuse that was held in London, Ontario, in June 1997. Liz Kelly is Professor of Sexualised Violence and Director of the Child and Woman Abuse Studies Unit at London Metropolitan University. She has worked in the field of violence against women and children for almost 30 years. She jointly undertook the key British work on the prevalence of sexual abuse in childhood. Prior to, and alongside her academic role, she has been active in establishing and working in local services including refuges and rape crisis centres, and in local, regional and national campaign groups. In the early 1970s she worked with children in a refuge in East Anglia. Her internationally respected groundbreaking work on women’s experiences of male violence was published as Surviving Sexual Violence (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1988) and is known in the USA through a chapter of a standard text of the same year: ‘How women define their experiences of violence’ in Yllö, K. and Bogard, M. Feminist Perspectives on Wife Abuse (Newbury Park, CA: Sage). She is also one of the key thinkers who has made the connections between woman abuse and child abuse, challenging family dysfunction theories, and setting a clear research agenda for further work in this field in her chapter in Mullender and Morley’s 1994 book Children Living with Domestic Violence. Her theorizing continues to broach new territory, dealing currently with topics such as abuse in lesbian relationships, trafficking in women, the public focus on the term ‘paedophile’, and the issues surrounding ‘victim’ and ‘survivor’ as long-term core identities. She chaired the expert group established by the Council of Europe to formulate a plan of action to be adopted as official policy. She also increasingly provides expert testimony in court and advises the media in her areas of interest. She was awarded the CBE in 2000 for services combatting violence against women and children.

About the Authors ix Ellen Malos is a Senior Lecturer in the Domestic Violence Research Group of the School for Policy Studies at the University of Bristol. Her work spans interests in child care, domestic violence and gender studies. Funded work has resulted in research reports, conference papers, chapters and articles on custodianship, family violence, and an edited book The Politics of Housework (1980, revised in 1995 for New Clarion Press, Cheltenham). She has undertaken policy research work with funding from the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, the Department of Health, the Lord Chancellor’s Department and the Economic and Social Research Council. Currently, she is co-ordinating a four-university collaborative evaluation of the domestic violence multi-service interventions in the Home Office Crime Reduction Programme. Linda Regan is currently a senior research officer at the Child and Woman Abuse Studies Unit, London Metropolitan University, where she has been based for over 10 years. During that time she has been involved in over 30 research and evaluation projects, presented at numerous national and international conferences and delivered training to participants in both the voluntary and statutory sector at home and overseas. Linda is a member of several advisory boards and is a trustee of the Emma Humphreys Memorial Prize.

Acknowledgements

We should like to acknowledge the invaluable work of Wendy Dear, Cassie Hague and Christina Pantazis in Bristol, and particularly the extensive efforts of Sheila Burton in London and Parveen Akhtar in Durham, at various stages of the research on which this book is based. We should also like to thank all the schools and their pupils who were involved in Phase I of the project, the agencies who helped to locate a sample for Phase II, and, most especially, all the children, young people, their mothers and key professionals who gave unstintingly of their time to be interviewed. Thangam Debbonaire, former National Children’s Officer of the Women’s Aid Federation of England, kindly provided consultancy during the early stages of the research team’s work. Whilst, as authors, we naturally take responsibility for any errors that may have crept in, we are delighted to have shared a commitment to completing this important project with all those who helped us undertake it.

1

Children in Their Own Issue: A Shift of Approach

INTRODUCTION No precise figures are available as to how many children in the UK live with domestic violence.1 We do know, however, that there are many and that they are everywhere because this can be extrapolated from studies of the number of women who experience abuse. Mooney (1994), for example, had self-reports from approaching one in three women, across all social and ethnic groupings, that they had experienced violence worse than being pushed, grabbed or shaken at some point in their adult lives. Since her study was designed to take a representative sample of the general population of women, we may assume that many of those interviewed had children living with them at the time the domestic violence occurred. Certainly, the British Crime Survey in 1996 found that half the women who reported experiencing domestic violence in the previous year were living with children under 16, and that having children in the household was associated with an increased risk of assault (Mirrlees-Black, 1999). There is now a widespread recognition that children living in households where their mothers are abused by partners or ex-partners experience considerable distress (Jaffe et al., 1990) and frequently display adverse reactions (Wolfe et al., 1986). Yet, though some practitioners and policy makers now go as far as regarding this as a form of indirect abuse, mainstream services are still failing to give the most appropriate help (McGee, 2000; Mullender and Morley, 1994; Peled et al., 1995). This book will suggest that part of the problem is that the children and young people themselves – those who live with domestic violence going on around them – are not being listened to and that their own understandings of their situation are overlooked, as are the ways in which they attempt to deal with it. There is a wider issue, too, about educating the public, at all ages and beginning in schools, about domestic violence and what can be done about it. Professionals and policy makers in a range of public and voluntary sector agencies do now recognize that they should be responding to children who live with violence but are often confused as to what to do (Abrahams, 1994; McWilliams and McKiernan, 1993). There is a tendency to encompass domestic violence as just another child protection issue (Humphreys, 2000a; Parkinson and Humphreys, 1998), without acknowledging the complex interactions between women’s safety and children’s well-being (Kelly, 1994b). Although there is a clear overlap between direct child abuse and domestic violence (see summaries in Morley and Mullender, 1994, and in Hester et al., 2000), focusing too narrowly on safeguarding children without a raised awareness of the potential for partnership

2 Children’s Perspectives on Domestic Violence

with the non-abusing parent and for tackling the perpetrator’s behaviour can lead to dangerously ineffectual responses both for women and children. Women are left in fear of their lives, opportunities are missed to keep children safe, and dangerous men are avoided (Farmer and Owen, 1995, pp. 223–6; Hester and Pearson, 1998; Humphreys, 2000a). Women’s services, especially Women’s Aid, with its 30-year history of working with children accompanying their mothers into refuges, have developed a more integrated approach (Ball, 1990; Debbonaire, 1994; Hague et al., 1996). However, it is not always accorded the respect it deserves by those responsible for policy and practice in the statutory sector so that, once again, the safety of women and children is not maximized. When the academic and professional debate first started in this field, children were conceptualized in conference titles and training events as ‘passive victims’ or ‘silent witnesses’. The present authors’ earlier work (Hague et al., 1996; Kelly, 1994a; Mullender et al., 1998) showed, on the contrary, that children who live with domestic violence have their own coping strategies and their own perspectives on what happens to them. Each child reacts as an individual. There is no one pattern of responses and no syndrome to sum up the impact of their experiences (Morley and Mullender, 1994). This realization led to a conviction that research in this field must involve children directly, as well as those who care for and work with them. It also means that, as users of services, children require interventions tailored to their levels of understanding, their age and stage of development, their particular viewpoint, and their specific circumstances. There are dangers in adults making assumptions about children’s needs, rather than basing policy and practice on evidence from child-centred research. The earlier work by the present authors further suggested that, over time, most children are able to talk about their experiences and that their views could inform a more coherent interagency response. Very little research to date has been designed with the intention of hearing the voices of children and young people about domestic violence, either in general terms or concerning how those who have lived with it cope with and make sense of their experiences. The present team (Hague et al., 1996; Kelly, 1994a; Mullender et al., 1998) had already revealed the potential for this within previous carefully designed and sensitive studies. There is an urgent need to know more about children’s experiences as they perceive them, the impact these have, how children make sense of them, the responses they receive from various agencies, and whether there is any fit between what children feel they need and what they get. Readiness to incorporate messages from research on this topic is indicated by the rash of publishing on domestic violence, for example in relation to social work (Mullender, 1996; Pryke and Thomas, 1998; Thomas and Lebacq, 2000) and health (Bewley et al., 1997; Mezey, 1997; SNAP, 1997; BMA, 1998), and by levels of activity in reviewing policy and practice (e.g. Mullender and Humphreys, 1998; Humphreys and Mullender, 2000). The primary objectives of the major research study reported in this book were, in the first phase, to learn about children’s general understandings and perceptions of domestic violence and, in the second phase, more specifically, to learn from children who have lived with domestic violence what they consider would be the most helpful forms of response. This latter point includes building on

Children in Their Own Issue: A Shift of Approach 3 children’s agency in the situation and not treating them as passive victims. In order to meet these aims, a multi-methodological, multi-stage approach was employed which will be outlined in detail in the next chapter. Particular care was taken to include ethnically diverse voices and to consider the gender implications of girls’ and boys’ responses about men’s and women’s behaviour. The remainder of this chapter will explore why it seemed important – and potentially possible – to conduct such research, and what knowledge we were building on, including from our own earlier work. CHILDHOOD STUDIES Academic interest in childhood and in ‘the child’ has gone under the generic title of the ‘sociology of childhood’ (perhaps misleadingly, since sociology does not have the longest tradition here and is only one of many disciplines involved) or ‘childhood studies’ (James et al., 1998). Broadly, it may be seen as part of a challenge to researchers’ accounts of ‘the other’ (including from standpoint and postmodern approaches), in this case of perceptions of children and of concepts of childhood constructed by adult observers. We now understand that adult representations and interpretations of children’s lives might say more about the observer than the observed and, to avoid this, it has come to be seen as essential to convey children’s own accounts at first hand – to include their voices. France et al. (2000) see this also as a feature of ‘grounded theory’ (Glaser and Strauss, 1967); that is, as theory emerging from the data so that, rather than preconceptualizing children’s lives, we are able to build our understandings on hearing from children and young people themselves about what the issues are for them and how they make sense of what they are experiencing. In fact, the implications go wider than grounded theory, having relevance for every research methodology and method, both within quantitative (Hill, 1997a; Scott, 2000) and qualitative (Hill, 1997a; Mauthner, 1997) traditions, with an increasingly participatory role for children themselves, right through to acting as their own researchers (Alderson, 2000). Such a paradigm shift has not been easy to make. Adults have been accustomed to regarding children as growing up into the adult world – being educated and socialized so as to be assimilated into (adult) society – which carries the connotation that children qua children are incomplete, that they are becoming rather than being (Qvortrup, 1994). They are somehow seen as not yet competent, not integrated into adult concerns and understandings, purely because of their stage of biological and social development. Developmental psychology, always one of the strongest influences on child care policy and practice, for example, is grounded in this kind of deficit model of childhood (Butler and Williamson, 1994) and all the earliest work on children and domestic violence falls within this tradition, as does most of the related research that continues in North America. Children are thereby marginalized as a source of information about their own lives, and too readily ignored in the design and delivery of policy and practice responses.

4 Children’s Perspectives on Domestic Violence

But other approaches are possible. Childhood is now understood as socially constructed (Archard, 1993; Ariès, 1979; Jenks, 1982) since children are regarded in different ways by adults according to historical, social and cultural context and are expected to behave accordingly. For example, children are still expected to remain innocent yet, nowadays, to learn to protect themselves from abuse (being taught in school about stranger danger, less often about the potential dangers at home). Childhood is also a context in which part of everyone’s life is lived, in whatever era or cultural group they are born. All the big issues of contemporary existence and of social science – the role of the State, shifting morality, the state of welfare, the (de)construction of the family – can be looked at from and in relation to the perspective of childhood; all these matters impinge on children and children have their own attitudes towards them. Children who live with violence, for instance, form views about why it occurs, whose fault it is, and whether anyone from outside should intervene. Children search for their own meanings and understandings in what happens to them and they act accordingly. Thus childhood is not simply socially constructed within a culturally relative context or biologically determined through processes of child development; children also have agency within it: ‘childhood is a negotiated process where children are active in constructing their own social worlds, and reflecting upon and understanding its meaning and significance to their own personal lives’ (France et al., 2000, p. 151). This may seem an odd claim to make in introducing a study about a phenomenon – domestic violence – where both the children and their non-abusing parent are held under the power and control of the perpetrator (Pence and Paymar, 1996), sometimes virtually to the point of being imprisoned in their own home. The findings from the study reported here will show, however, the many ways in which children do form their own views and take their own actions in order to survive in such an adverse situation. Chapter 5 will explore in some detail the coping strategies they adopt. This raises new issues for parents and professionals about explaining to children what is happening when their mothers are being abused and involving them in decisions about what will happen in their lives as a result. It connects with some quite deepseated questions as to whether children are ontologically different from adults and whether or not adults have a ‘“natural” right to exert power over children’ (Qvortrup, 1994, p. 3). We are used to seeing adults as the more important social actors and as acting in the best interests of children, nowhere more so than in child care policy and practice. Some of the conclusions of this book will challenge whether adults always make the right assumptions about children and their needs in situations where there is violence, and will call for a radical rethink. CHILDREN’S RIGHTS Rights for children have received both philosophical (Archard, 1993) and more policy-focused attention in the literature (Franklin, 1995). After many years of the children’s rights movement in various countries of the world, children do now

Children in Their Own Issue: A Shift of Approach 5 have limited individual rights. These are enshrined most notably in the 1989 UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, ratified in the UK in 1991. In particular, children have the right, under Article 12 of the Convention, to express their views in all matters affecting them. Children also have a right to have their wishes and feelings taken into account by local authorities and courts who are making decisions about them under the Children Act 1989. When it comes to domestic violence, however, questions have begun to be posed as to whether the current enunciation of children’s rights is sufficiently sophisticated to encompass the complexities of living with abuse (Kelly and Mullender, 2000). In relation to the UN Convention, there is no doubt that children require protection by the state from all forms of abuse, exploitation and neglect (Articles 19 and 34) and to have their survival and development ensured (Article 6) by policy and practice responses that operate in their best interests (Article 3). How this is best achieved can, however, become a vexed question where there is one abusing and one non-abusing parent and the Convention offers no clarification in these circumstances. It encompasses, for example, both parents providing guidance (Article 5), maintaining contact (Article 9), being protected from interference with privacy, family and home (Article 16) and sharing primary responsibility for bringing up children (Article 18), all without acknowledging that there is a difference in every one of these regards between a parent who is posing a threat and one who is seeking to protect. An abusive parent may well not have the child’s interests at heart and may be using parental guidance to instil ideas of male dominance, for example, or seeking post-separation contact so as to regain the opportunity to abuse and intimidate (Hester and Radford, 1996; Women’s Aid Federation of England, 1997; Radford et al., 1999). Exposure to the perpetrator may be damaging or dangerous for the child as well as the woman. In other words, issues of parental contact, care and guidance are not equal or neutral where the situation involves violence and abuse. Similarly, an abusive man kidnapping his child does not in any way equate with an abused woman fleeing with the child to safety, yet Article 11 (the state’s obligation to try to prevent and remedy the kidnapping or retention abroad by a parent or third party) makes no apparent distinction between abduction and protection. The child’s mother could be accused of kidnapping the child and preventing her or him from having contact with the other parent if the situation is not seen in gendered terms or analysed in relation to the power, control and abuse that drive its dynamics. The UN Convention does not recognize that two parents may not have a shared view of good parenting and that, in many contexts, they are not ‘equal’ either in the home or before the law. Its apparent neutrality in encompassing both parents is therefore actually working to reinforce and collude with their inherent inequality. As a consequence, we would argue that children’s rights cannot be fully pursued unless women’s rights are also taken on board in any situation where both are being threatened. Indeed, we would go further and argue that the UN’s consideration of children’s rights should be meshed in with its work on women’s rights, notably through the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) (an optional protocol which has not to date been signed by the UK).

6 Children’s Perspectives on Domestic Violence

This dilemma concerning an abusing and a non-abusing parent also occurs under the Children Act 1989 if the state, in the shape of social workers, does not distinguish between the culpability of the two. A common manifestation of this is an accusation against an abused woman of ‘failure to protect’ her children, even when she is in fear of her own life and typically without offering her any help to preserve her own safety so that she can better care for her children (see Humphreys, 2000a, for a fuller discussion). Often, this is a thinly veiled attempt to persuade the woman to leave her abuser, with little understanding that she may be in intensified danger if she does so (Wilson and Daly, 1992). A third of women killed by male partners and ex-partners are already living apart (Edwards, 1989) from men who appear to work on the premise ‘If I can’t have you, no one will’. Overall, then, the debate about children’s rights needs to be gendered and to take on board the risks of abuse both of children and their mothers. RESEARCHING WITH CHILDREN The direct corollary of the theoretical and legal developments outlined above, in recognizing the social agency and voice of children, is that research should focus centrally upon them, accepting that their ‘social relationships and cultures are worthy of study in their own right’ (James and Prout, 1997, p. 4). Is researching children different from researching adults? This may depend on whether we regard children as uniquely vulnerable and in need of protection (Morrow and Richards, 1996), which would tend to place them in a passive and ultimately silenced position. France et al. (2000) argue that grounding research in the views and experiences of those being researched, in this case children, is the same practice as with adults but that, within this, it is necessary to respect difference. The key issues, they argue – teasing out the practical issues which flow from adopting a different ontological position – may be the age difference between the researched and the researcher, together with the way the latter is perceived, the need to develop methods most likely to help children and young people express themselves, and the particular dynamics of consent and confidentiality. The latter were of even greater concern to the present authors, given the sensitivity of the topic we were exploring (that of abuse), and will be dealt with at some length in the next chapter. What has to change if we are serious about researching with children rather than conducting research about children? Research with children – and the theory and resultant policy and practice it generates – will only be rounded and useful if it is based upon: • taking children seriously • seeking to understand children as people in their own right • acknowledging children as social actors in the social contexts of their own lives • acknowledging children as playing a role in society as a whole

Children in Their Own Issue: A Shift of Approach 7 • conceptualizing children as having their own life arenas, their own concept and use of time, and their own activities, which are not … merely colonized by adult society for its own purposes and interests. (Based on Qvortrup et al., 1994) According to Mayall (1996), placing children at the centre of our research requires three methodological shifts. It means regarding children as competent and reflexive in reporting on their own experiences, giving them a voice and taking seriously what they say, and working for children rather than on them in ways that may lead to the betterment of their social worlds. All three of these aims applied to our own project and to a growing body of work that preceded us in other fields of enquiry. THE ETHICS OF RESEARCHING WITH CHILDREN Until recently in this country, children were not thought to be capable of judgement or of bearing reliable witness to their own experience. Adults also thought they knew best and set the boundaries of what they were prepared to ask or hear from children (Qvortrup, 1994). The challenge posed by according children more respect as research subjects is to rethink our approach to ethics along the same lines. If children have agency in their lives, then this applies to the choices we construe as ethical dilemmas in social research. And to construct a separate ethics for research with children might be to stereotype them as somehow less competent if they are seen as needing adults to intervene with special protective measures. But are there limitations on treating children exactly like adults where research ethics are concerned? Are there any areas in which we should treat children and young people differently from adults, or are there only areas in which, though they may have arisen in the context of debates about children, ethical dilemmas would in fact be posed whoever the research subjects happened to be? Mayall (1994) sees the problems that some regard as inherent in gathering data from children – that children may fantasize or try to please the interviewer, that they are too inexperienced to comment, that they only repeat what adults have told them – as being also present in work with adults and hence not valid objections to researching with children or, we might add, necessitating a separate ethical code. The same is true of research questions that are imposed on the subject rather than being framed out of their own experience, and of negative images employed by researchers that do not serve the wider interests of the group being researched. Any group that is relatively lacking in power and influence can find itself subject to these forms of exclusion and marginalization. CONSENT More than we might initially suppose, then, is common to adult and child research subjects. Particular ethical questions in research with children do arise,

8 Children’s Perspectives on Domestic Violence

however. Notable among them is the issue of whose consent should be sought to involve the child in research. Should this be the parent (or anyone in loco parentis) or the child or both? And, if the parent or carer is approached, does this only cover access to the child, so that the child can still be separately asked whether they want to take part, or does it amount to a proxy consent to conduct the interview (Mahon et al., 1996)? If we do by-pass parents, we need to consider whether the outcome is solely to accord young people greater autonomy or whether we are also depriving them of their parents’ protection – the ‘respect vs. protect’ debate (Alderson, 1995). The area in which this question has been most fully considered is that of young people’s right to give consent to medical treatment. Priscilla Alderson outlines the now somewhat confused state of the legislation in England and Wales. The concept of ‘Gillick competence’ – the idea that young people achieve, over time, a level of understanding at which they can make their own choices (as set down in the House of Lords ruling on the Gillick case; see Alderson, 1995) – has been followed by apparently contradictory case law. Alderson encourages us to consider whether the approach taken in the Gillick judgement establishes a framework for best practice in obtaining research consent from children and young people. She states the additional caveat that research is rarely in an individual’s immediate interests, as medical treatment could be argued to be, and should therefore carry even less risk of harm to the subject than intervention for reasons of treatment or care in case it is later challenged. The overall outcome of all the legal cogitation is a need for every professional to judge whether a child or young person is competent to consent on his or her own behalf. Alderson’s complex discussion has been summarized by Ward (1997: 20) as boiling down to whether a child is able to make ‘informed, wise and voluntary decisions’. These three concepts of understanding, wisdom and freedom are certainly equally relevant to research studies in which children are asked to participate; they mean that we have a responsibility to explain the study and its implications as fully as we possibly can, to decide whether or not the child is able to act in his or her own best interests, and to give her or him every opportunity to exercise a free choice over whether or not to participate in some or all of the exercise. Alderson (1995) offers a checklist of points to consider about children’s consent in order to make this a more fully informed and freely chosen process. For example, children may need time to think about whether or not to agree to be interviewed, together with reassurance that a refusal would not be held against them in any way. Also, the child may or may not want a parent to be present, depending on whether they are nervous of being alone with a stranger or keen to get their own ideas across in privacy. Context may also be crucial. Compliance may replace consent in school, for example, if children see the research as just another piece of work they are given to do in class (Morrow and Richards, 1996; Costley, 2000) and ways may need to be found to give them at least a real choice of opting out (see Chapter 2). On the other hand, it could be argued that school is one of children’s familiar places and that where research into abuse in the family is concerned it has the advantage of being somewhere safely away from the perpetrator.

Children in Their Own Issue: A Shift of Approach 9 CHILD PROTECTION AND RESEARCH ETHICS Where children have already had adverse experiences that may have been distressing or damaging – which has traditionally been true of the majority of children who have interested researchers (Alderson, 1995) and is certainly true of those we interviewed – there could arguably be a greater need for protection from potentially exploitative researchers (Morrow and Richards, 1996). It is not clear, though, that this would be fundamentally different from researching vulnerable adults except, again, for the role of the parent or carer in being consulted. The same could even be said of children’s lack of knowledge and experience and their political marginalization in that not all adults are equally sophisticated in these regards (Lansdown, 1994). There is always a risk of exploitation and potential harm caused by any insensitive or unscrupulous research. On the other hand, it has been argued that parents, carers or researchers who exclude children from research ‘in their best interests’ may do harm of a different kind, leaving children silenced as opposed to unprotected (Alderson, 1995): ‘too tight ethical guidelines might be used to shut the door on what young people have to tell us’ (researcher cited in Alderson, 1995, p. 43). Perhaps it is unethical to overprotect children from research, not only because this excludes them (Alderson, 1995), but also because we will then end up intervening in their lives in ways which adults have established to be best, without understanding how children and young people themselves perceive or experience these wellintentioned but perhaps misguided efforts. Nevertheless, there may be particular concerns. Morrow and Richards (1996) refer to the adult duty to protect children from harm so that if, for example, there is a disclosure of risk or actual abuse, most researchers would regard themselves as obliged to report this through child protection channels (or, better, to have the child or a parent or carer report it, with the researcher supporting them in an appropriate way), and consequently would only ever offer children limited confidentiality at the outset of the research. Morrow and Richards discuss the balance between the loss of trust (and potentially access) if such a report is made, against the loss of credibility if nothing is done. Butler and Williamson (1994) departed from this norm and operated from a basis of negotiating with the child what to do should such an eventuality arise, exactly as one would do with a vulnerable adult, as opposed to someone in the status category of ‘child’. In other words, they offered young people complete rather than limited confidentiality. Few have been brave enough to follow their lead without caveats (see Mahon et al., 1996; Thomas and O’Kane, 1998). At the end of the day, the ethics of research with children may boil down to not underestimating them while, at the same time, ensuring that they come to no harm (Morrow and Richards, 1996). (Alderson’s respect/protect idea – see above.) CHILD-CENTRED ETHICS: METHODS PROCESS AND THEORY Even though most ethical considerations may be common to adults and children, or at least overlap substantially, it can equally well be argued that there are

10 Children’s Perspectives on Domestic Violence

residual elements throughout research design and process that can exclude or exploit children if age-appropriateness is not observed. These therefore have ethical implications. Morrow and Richards (1996) suggest that they include the following: avoiding adult-framed questions and implied answers; taking time to develop trust, especially as children are not used to being asked their opinions; involving children and young people far more in the research process; and triangulation of methods to avoid bias in such a marginalized population (where they may not fully trust us and we may not fully hear them). The present authors hoped, for example, that triangulating data between individual and group interviews would increase the chances of children sharing fuller information with us; we also built trust over time and left diaries for the children to complete in their own time and in privacy (op. cit. and see Chapter 2, this volume). Hood et al. (1996) add ‘getting the context right’ to this list: we need to consider, for example, where children will feel most easily able to talk and who they will feel comfortable talking to (see Chapter 6, this volume, on the enormous difference it made when Asian children could talk to Asian researchers from a basis of shared understanding). A child’s willingness to be open and honest with the researcher has, of course, an impact on the overall validity of the research (Mahon et al., 1996). Berry Mayall (1994), who has done as much as anyone to equalize the treatment of children and adults in research, still sees the ensuing analysis and resultant theorizing as having to be conducted by adults, on the grounds of greater knowledge, albeit at the risk of reintroducing a conflict of perspective and interests. There is a literature, though, that would push even at these boundaries, where specialist knowledge might be needed to ‘crunch the numbers’ but not necessarily to make sense of what they can tell us (see Dullea and Mullender, 1999, for a summary). There are also ethical aspects of dissemination (Morrow and Richards, 1996). Since children are largely powerless to challenge media hype and distortion, particular caution may need to be exercised both with the sense made of data they have shared and with the way findings are presented. Finally, at the broadest possible level, there are ethical implications in the model of childhood that is being applied. If children are seen as ‘mature moral agents’ (Alderson, 1995, p. 5), then relevant considerations include not just the research methods adopted but also the reporting of children’s own words, a portrayal of positive images of childhood, and the impact of the research both on these children and on children more generally. Taking this contextualization still further, if the socio-political or policy/practice environment is ignored (Alderson, 1995), and the subjects are studied as if they lived in a vacuum, then individualistic analyses will result that tend to ‘blame the victim’ (Ryan, 1971). In domestic violence research, for example, most researchers would make a link between gender stereotyping and violence against women; most would also regard this as having policy and practice implications in relation to tackling perpetrators’ behaviour rather than re-victimizing women and children. It is important not to lose sight of these wider issues when researching with the children involved, for example by not applying narrowly child protectionist models that focus on intervening with mothers and their children to the exclusion of confronting dangerous men.

Children in Their Own Issue: A Shift of Approach 11 CREATING NEW KNOWLEDGE WITH CHILDREN Once researchers began to conduct studies involving children directly, and the ethical dilemmas began to be resolved, work flourished in a number of areas. Notable recent examples include studies in the field of health (e.g. Alderson and Montgomery, 1996, on health care choices; France et al., 2000, on children’s beliefs about health) and children’s experiences of disability (Beresford, 1997; Davis et al., 2000; Morris, 1998; Ward, 1997). Children’s opinions have been sought on social issues as wide-ranging as the family (Morrow, 1998), parenting (National Family and Parenting Institute, 2000), physical punishment (Willow and Hyder, 1998), current anxieties about harm and risk (Butler and Williamson, 1994), their broader concerns for the future (The Young Researchers, 1998; NCH Action for Children, undated) and their general social attitudes (Roberts and Sachdev, 1996; Ghate and Daniels, 1997). These publications further reveal that all the major child care charities have involved their own or academic researchers in eliciting children and young people’s views. The major social science research funders have also devoted whole research programmes to children and to youth, with a particular focus on children’s and young people’s own perspectives. We know, then, that we are seeing an important trend. Children and young people have recently been consulted on the services available to them on a scale ranging from a single residential respite care service for learning disabled children (Marchant, Jones, Julyan and Giles, 1999; Marchant, Jones and Martyn, 1999), through to the totality of council services in Newham (Students from Sarah Bonnell and Brampton Manor Schools, 1997). In the welfare field, feedback has encompassed most elements of what children and young people experience. It has ranged from eliciting their views on professional intervention following child sexual abuse (NCH Action for Children in partnership with the Newcomen Centre and the Bloomfield Clinic at Guy’s Hospital, 1994; Westcott and Davies, 1996), in child protection cases more generally (Barford, 1993) and regarding involvement in child protection conferences (Shemmings, 1996), through being ‘looked after’ in the public care (Baldry and Kemmis, 1998) and involved in decisions during that experience (Thomas and O’Kane, 2000), to adoption (Thomas and Beckford, 1999). In relation to child and family social work more broadly, Hill (1997b) has published a research synthesis of over 70 publications featuring children’s perspectives, from which he concludes that children should be given better information and more say in the process of social work intervention, particularly in child protection cases. One service in the voluntary sector, ChildLine, because its entire work consists of listening to the voices of children, has offered especially rich information about how and why children use its dedicated helpline and how this meshes into the broader context of their lives, their families and their other help-seeking activities (see, for example, ChildLine, 1996; undated). The rationale for conducting the research was that: ‘The world of children can be impenetrable to adults … Children’s own perceptions and their experiences are usually mediated through adult preoccupations, especially when it comes to child abuse and child protection’ (ChildLine, 1996, p. 6). The only solution is to talk to children directly.

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Consistent themes from all this research have been that it is perfectly possible to discuss a whole range of topics with children, with very fruitful results, and that children want more say in all aspects of their lives. Though Hill’s (1997b) research synthesis, mentioned above, revealed that teenagers had been more often asked for their views than younger children, it is nevertheless clear, for example from a survey of 5- to 7-year-olds on physical punishment (Willow and Hyder, 1998), that much younger children can also express their understanding and opinions – in this case on how they define smacking, what it feels like to be smacked, and where and why adults smack children. Nor are there good reasons to exclude children whose understanding or communication skills are limited for reasons other than age. It is perfectly possible to consult children with a wide range of disabilities, provided that the interviewer possesses sufficient skill and uses appropriate communication methods (Beresford, 1997). Visual and play techniques of various kinds (Marchant, Jones, Julyan and Giles, 1999; O’Kane, 2000), ‘yes/no’ answers or multiple choice questions help children who have difficulty writing (Ward, 1997), and group interviews with an interviewer who has built up a measure of rapport, can work well, for example, for those with moderate learning difficulties (Costley, 2000). Also, talking to children and young people can encompass extremely sensitive material, such as the experience of being medically examined following a sexual abuse allegation (Westcott and Davies, 1996), again provided that the interviewer conducts the interview appropriately. Exclusion can happen, too, where some groups of children are overlooked and it is important that sampling pays due attention to ethnicity, for example (see Chapter 6). Children do not have to be asked pre-set questions determined by adults. Marchant, Jones, Julyan and Giles ‘tried to give control of the agenda (and as far as possible the process), to the young people’ (1999: 5) so that they were genuinely consulting rather than studying them. As with all participatory research (Dullea and Mullender, 1999), this means moving away from treating those we interview as ‘research subjects’ towards involving them in some level of partnership. The ultimate in this trend is empowering young people themselves to act as researchers (Kirby, 1999; Worrall, 2000; The Young Researchers, 1998) and giving a sense of ownership by disseminating in appropriate ways, such as directing a final report specifically towards the young people who participated in the research (Marchant, Jones and Martyn, 1999). Keeping language age- and ability-appropriate is vital, including in the way the researchers themselves talk about the project so that they do not exclude in unforeseen ways (Marchant, Jones, Julyan and Giles, 1999). Representing the full diversity of children means involving boys and girls in approximately equal numbers, ensuring that those with disabilities (see above) and those from a range of ethnic and social backgrounds can participate appropriately, and sampling across the selected age range. It also implies making the decision as to how young the children can be on research-specific grounds, not according to preconceived notions about what children can and cannot do, especially since such assumptions vary across cultures and societies (James et al., 1998). Direct parallels with our own study in the above discussion include asking general populations of young people about social issues, asking those who have

Children in Their Own Issue: A Shift of Approach 13 used them about the services available and their own help-seeking activities, interviewing children about sensitive topics, and extending the lower age range of children consulted to those in the middle years, not just teenagers. We also involved children and young people in the design of our research instruments and in planning our research process. Our confidence in the viability of our proposed study drew, then, upon a deepening consensus in the research world that there is enormous potential for consulting children’s views on an ever-widening range of subjects and upon a background of developing skills which seek to ensure that this happens appropriately. DOMESTIC VIOLENCE RESEARCH AND CHILDREN Despite all of the work discussed in preceding sections, within our specialist field of domestic violence research, when we started our study, there had been no others published that placed children’s own perspectives at the heart of the subject. Adultgenerated research-based papers about children living in situations where their mothers were being abused had appeared in the USA and Canada in the 1980s, leading to the first book on the subject, Children of Battered Women (Jaffe et al., 1990). This highlighted that living with violence could adversely affect children’s behavioural and emotional adjustment and cognitive development and argued, consequently, that responses and intervention with children in all settings should routinely include an assessment of exposure to violence. Jaffe et al. (1990) did not cite the words of children directly except in passing in one chapter, moderated through a small number of case studies that were gathered, interpreted and presented by adults. The research they reported was largely in the positivist tradition of developmental psychology and psychiatry, and most of the work in the USA and Canada has continued the quest for ‘psychopathology’ in children who have witnessed violence against their mothers. As Alderson (1995) notes of research about rather than with children more generally, this has a history where ‘researchers have collected the views of parents, teachers and other adults, assuming that their views represent children’s own views, although this is frequently not so’ (p. 91). The first British text on children and domestic violence came in 1994 (Mullender and Morley, 1994), offering a conceptual framework in a UK legal and comparative practice context, and the first original UK research appeared in the same year (Abrahams, 1994). Since then, a body of important home-grown work has followed. It covers, for example, how professionals respond to domestic violence in contexts of child protection (Hester and Pearson, 1998; Humphreys, 2000a), divorce (Hester and Radford, 1996), and refuge and aftercare (Hague et al., 1996; Humphreys, 2000b; Kelly, 1994a; Mullender et al., 1998), as well as more generally (Humphreys et al., 2000). The studies that have consulted children directly will be summarised below. The early NCH Action for Children study (Abrahams, 1994) did talk to children and young people directly about domestic violence. Though mainly concerned with women’s reporting of their children’s experiences, the in-depth stage of the research included interviews with seven girls, aged between 8 and 17, who

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had lived with domestic violence: two whose mothers were attending family centres and who were also interviewed and five located through the charity’s projects for young homeless people. Although there were only seven of these interviews, they furnished rich information about children’s direct experiences which is presented in detail in the findings chapters of the research report, with a good many direct quotes. These illustrate all the key issues that have become familiar in the literature on children and domestic violence and may be summarised as follows: Nature of the the indirect abuse • details of the abuse witnessed Overlap with direct abuse • direct experience of physical and sexual abuse from the mother’s violent partner Impact of living with abuse • the emotional and psychological impact of both direct and indirect abuse, including fear, distress, guilt, embarrassment, confusion, hate, depression, conflicting loyalties, jumpiness, loss of self-esteem, self-confidence and selfrespect, happiness when the violence ended • other effects, including disturbed sleep (wakefulness, nightmares), bedwetting and eating disorders, behavioural changes (whether clinginess or aggression), impact on school attendance or performance and disrupted schooling, leaving home very young or being thrown out • the lasting memories (or emotionally blocking them out) and continuing impact Adverse impact on family relationships • stigma and family secrets • the atmosphere at home, particularly of fear and intimidation • adverse effects on children’s relationships with their mothers and siblings, including loss of respect for mother, lack of scope for mother to discipline the children (or over-chastising) or sometimes to give them adequate care or attention, aggression between siblings • awareness of the adverse impact on mother, including psychologically (depression, self-absorption, loss of self-esteem, alcohol misuse) Coping strategies • attempts to make sense of what had taken place (the violence, the leaving home and returning, post-separation violence), particularly whose fault it was (mother? self?) – both then and now, for example believing now that mother should have left a lot sooner • children creating a psychological or physical safe place • keeping the other siblings safe and sometimes caring for them • attempts to intervene and to summon help (or thinking about doing so, or guilt at not doing) • concealing the abuse from teachers and social workers for fear of recriminations at home, pity and lack of understanding, or being taken away

Children in Their Own Issue: A Shift of Approach 15 Responses of helping agencies • not being believed when they did disclose (one child had told a social worker but to no avail) Long-term impact • resentment at the loss of how childhood ought to have been • being ambivalent about intimate relationships • wider impact on interpersonal relationships as a young adult All of these themes recurred in our own work, reported in later chapters of this volume. Even in the seven interviews of the NCH Action for Children study (Abrahams, 1994), there is also evidence (which, again, we also found) that children react uniquely to their circumstances so that while one will for example, intervene, another will not feel able to do so. At the same time as the NCH Action for Children report was being written, a far larger number of children (1554 in the period June 1993 to May 1994) had talked to ChildLine about domestic violence, and a random sample of 126 of them over a six-month period had their calls analysed for the purposes of research (Epstein and Keep, 1995). Most were aged 11 to 15 (probably reflecting greater telephone use amongst teenagers than amongst younger children) and 91 per cent were girls, as opposed to around 80 per cent of ChildLine’s callers in general. Boys perhaps find it more difficult to talk about sensitive subjects, or it may occur to them less readily to do so (see Chapter 3, this volume, though this was not our finding in our in-depth interviews). The ChildLine study provides a precious insight into children’s experiences of living with domestic violence. This had usually occurred in their own homes and, though often not referred to by the young people as ‘domestic violence’, had typically been inflicted by their fathers (or less often their stepfathers) upon their mothers – sometimes after they had already separated. Since they were ringing a helpline, the young people talked about issues of their own choice, in their own words, and not according to a pre-set research agenda. Not all had called ChildLine because of the violence. For some, it formed a constant backdrop and had already become long-term. Where it had recently or only just started, however, it was more likely to be the main reason for the call. Children told ChildLine counsellors that the violence left them anxious and confused, particularly when it was unpredictable. Their reactions ranged from feeling helpless to taking responsibility for trying to hold the family together or for attempting to end the violence; some felt personally responsible. Distress, anger, insecurity and fear loomed large and children had no difficulty in describing the intensity of these feelings to the telephone counsellors, though they did not always say how they coped with them. A range of adverse physical and adjustment symptoms were also mentioned. In addition, more than a third (38 per cent) had themselves (and/or their siblings had been) physically abused by the perpetrator and this was sometimes the main reason for calling. This is a skewed sample in that the children had all called ChildLine and we might surmise that this means they had not received help from elsewhere. Within the family, it was impossible to turn for help to a terrifying father or a mother they

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wanted to protect from further anguish. Reasons for not talking to people outside ranged from covering up the abuse so as to protect parents to not being believed by a teacher. Police intervention, where it was mentioned, had not been effective in stopping the violence. Few of the young people were in touch with social services or Women’s Aid (six had actually called to request being taken into care). ChildLine counsellors discussed both these potential sources of help with children on the line but in the knowledge that some would probably be talking about their problems for the first time and that it might take several calls before any further action felt possible to them. There have been a number of other, smaller studies. The present research team conducted a national refuge-based study (Hague et al., 1996) which included individual and group interviews with children who had recently left violent situations. Individual refuge-based interviews with children in the middle years had already been tested out by Kelly (1994a), who talked to two girls, aged 10 and 11, as part of an evaluation of a particularly pioneering childwork project. ‘Rosie’ and ‘Clare’ (not their real names) had talked about the positive help they had received, so that they no longer had to keep their feelings bottled up or blame themselves for what had happened at home. Moving on from this foundation, the team again found that refuge interviews with children worked well, revealing individualized distress and fear reactions, and also resilience and coping strategies in relation to living with domestic violence. Children spoke about having to cope with moving home and school, often several times as their mothers had fled violence, and about disruptions to their schooling and to their family and friendship networks. They talked readily about why women and children come into refuges and what refuges are, what they themselves thought about living in one, both when they had first arrived and at the time of the interview, the best and worst things about refuges for children and what they would change about them if they could. They mentioned as problems the overcrowding and the presence of the naughtier children, the loss of all that was familiar, and the restrictions on going out and having friends back (because of keeping the location secret); but they liked being safe, being with other children, having play facilities and going out on trips. There tended to be less provision for teenagers (who represent only a small proportion of residents). Feedback on different refuges varied but, in general, they were not experienced as bad places by children, some of whom did not want to leave. In a related study (Humphreys, 2000b), five children interviewed by a children’s worker about their needs on leaving a particular refuge all said they would have liked some continued contact with a children’s programme. Another small-scale study of the issues and needs of children living with domestic violence was conducted on a more localized basis, in Coventry (Hendessi, 1997). As well as mothers and professionals, researchers saw 22 children and young people (only 17 of them aged under 17), either individually or in a group. Fourteen were from two local refuges and eight Asian children were living in the community. Older boys were less willing than girls to be interviewed (cf. Epstein and Keep, 1995), as well as being harder to access because many refuges have an upper age limit for boys, set at about 12. All the young people had either witnessed or heard the violence and all had been affected by it

Children in Their Own Issue: A Shift of Approach 17 emotionally, in terms of physical health, at school or in starting to truant. They had not felt able to turn for help to either adults or friends. This may reflect the young age of nine of the children (under 9) and the fact that more than half the sample was of Asian or mixed-race origin which can present additional difficulties both within the community and outside it. Some of the Asian women had been abused by other family members, notably brothers and in-laws, sometimes as well as by their partners, reflecting the complexities of domestic violence in a tight-knit, patriarchal community. As in the ChildLine study (Epstein and Keep, 1995), children did not tend to use the term ‘domestic violence’ but talked about ‘quarrels’ and ‘rows’ (see Chapter 3, this volume). Younger ones had a tendency to blame themselves, older ones were more likely to hold the perpetrator responsible. Ethnic minority children faced additional problems, including racial harassment, fear of abduction and the inadequacy of specialist services. All children had their own coping strategies (see Chapter 5, this volume). The youngest tended to disengage in various ways (playing, hiding, fantasizing) while the older ones showed a wider range of internalized symptoms and externalized behaviours, with truancy particularly noticeable amongst the teenagers. McGee’s (2000) was a much more comprehensive study, and the closest in scope to the qualitative phase of our own work. Based on in-depth interviews with 54 children and 48 mothers, it covered children’s experiences of living with direct and indirect abuse, often in their own words: witnessing and overhearing physical, emotional and sexual abuse, and the impacts this had on their feelings, identity, health, education, relationships and friendships. Almost a third of the book is devoted to agency responses, again focusing on children’s own views as well as those of their mothers. Children had had mixed experiences of social workers and teachers; some of the former failed to explain what was happening while the latter were sometimes supportive but did not always do anything practical to help. Experiences of the police were largely negative, whereas refuges were positively regarded by children as having improved their lives and given them the chance to talk freely, often for the first time. Finally, McGee considers what children see as the barriers to help-seeking. Children had tried talking to their mothers (this tended to become easier after leaving the violence), grandparents, siblings and trusted friends. They were often scared of telling professionals what was happening at home for fear of escalating the situation or causing violent recriminations, sometimes even after leaving. There were many emotional and practical barriers to disclosure, including a feeling of stigma and fear of not being believed. Children often did not know where to go for help or, if they had heard of ChildLine or other agencies, sometimes lacked access to a telephone or the freedom of movement to use one in privacy, particularly where the violent man was exerting total control over their lives. Some children, of differing ages, felt they would not know what to say or would not be believed, especially if the perpetrator denied their story. Although McGee’s book is called Childhood Experiences of Domestic Violence, and is rich in children’s own accounts, it gives equal space to mothers’ views of their own and their children’s problems. By definition, though, the book

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is firmly in the tradition of participative research with children in that it draws on children’s own experiences and understandings and also discusses their agency (in the form of coping strategies) at some length. The content is not overtly placed within this ontological/theoretical framework, however, and tends to feel somewhat descriptive overall. Owing to practical problems, interviews could not be pursued with mothers whose first language was not English and it is unclear whether any of the children’s researchers were from minority ethnic communities which may have restricted what the children felt able to say to them (see Chapter 6, this volume). Also, although 13 per cent of the sample (it is not clear whether this refers to the children or to them and their mothers jointly) described themselves as black, their experiences are not separately analysed. The outcomes of the study confirm and reinforce much of what was already known, telling the stories of living with violence from children’s own perspectives. The book is chiefly valuable for its richness of detail, rather than for offering new insights, but it is an essential read for anyone who works with children they know or suspect to have had violence in their background.

TALKING TO CHILDREN ABOUT DOMESTIC VIOLENCE Does this accumulating body of research mean that we can now talk straightforwardly to children about domestic violence? Jaffe et al. (1990), writing about practice settings, considered that children would be reluctant to discuss domestic violence because they would wish to protect their parents. Disclosures might be triggered, they thought, in the course of a crisis when professionals became involved, or in reaction to relevant materials in the classroom, for example. Yet they said of their own clinical work that ‘The children we have interviewed are almost universal in their need to be listened to, believed, and supported. They usually are not looking for solutions but an opportunity to share their fears about their mother and perhaps all members of the family. Children at different stages of development may express these feelings directly to adults with whom they feel safe, or indirectly through play and drawings’ (p. 83). Although the link had not, at that time, yet been made with listening to children as a research method, the lessons from practice were about trust, pace, listening, believing, and using appropriate communication techniques. Care over obtaining consent, the potential for distress, and the need for sensitivity to the risk of harm, all feature in the research literature on domestic violence and children. Abrahams (1994), in writing up the NCH Action for Children research study, talked about the dilemmas the researchers experienced as to whether they might be exploiting already vulnerable children and young people by gathering research data from them, and about the issue of knowing when consent was real or was mediated by the child’s mother. In practice, in the two cases in that study where children were identified through their mothers (who were also interviewed), both mother and child were asked to give permission for the interviews to proceed. In an overlapping field, Mahon et al. (1996), in their study of

Children in Their Own Issue: A Shift of Approach 19 the Child Support Act 1991 which involved talking to children about their parents separating or living apart, wondered whether the interviews might be distressing for children. They consequently paid particular attention to interview closure (as did we), asking the children how they felt at the end of the interview. The same authors’ work on young carers (op. cit.) involved children who were in touch with professional support, and topics the children had previously talked to those professionals about, so, although there was sensitivity and sadness about the family illness or disability which had given rise to the children’s caring roles, the researchers perhaps felt less necessity to build particular precautions into the interviews. Domestic violence studies, including our own, tend to have targeted children who are, similarly, in touch with services (and still living with the nonabusing parent) so that they do have supports available. Given the uncertainty of professionals and researchers about discussing domestic violence with children who have lived with it, it is perhaps not surprising that mothers, too, may be hesitant. Both mothers and children in the NCH Action for Children study (Abrahams, 1994), described the emotional and other obstacles to this. Many mothers, it emerges from that study, considered that their children were too young to talk about the violence or believed they were unaware of it or that it was an issue best not broached with them. Children pick up on these boundaries and decide not to raise the subject themselves. This is a theme that recurs in our own research and will be discussed in some detail in Chapter 5. Yet strongly present, here and in both stages of our own study, is the theme of children wanting someone to talk to. Those young people interviewed in the NCH Action for Children study (Abrahams, 1994) felt that sharing their experiences earlier would have helped them to make sense of what was happening and to feel less isolated, sad and overwhelmed. It would have had to be someone with whom there was a bond of trust. Two had had such a person, one a friend and the other her grandparents, while a third had later been able to confide in a social worker who had treated her ‘as a person’ (p. 93). Researchers were not, of course, first on this scene of talking to children about direct and indirect abuse and need not be our only sources of advice on how to do it appropriately. Practitioners in social work and child health are enormously experienced in interviewing children about their experiences of the most distressing forms of sexual and physical abuse. They learn how to hear children’s voices without visibly registering shock, disgust or alarm, so that children will feel safe confiding in them (Bray, 1997). It is often crucially important, for purposes of courtroom evidence, that children talk in their own words, at their own pace, and do not have ideas suggested to them by the adult interviewer. Closer links between research and practice skills, techniques and values in work with children would be a most valuable sharing (Thomas and O’Kane, 2000). Most notably in respect of domestic violence, children’s workers in refuges have been sensitive listeners to children for over a quarter of a century now. In recent years, they have begun collecting together for publication children’s accounts of the violence and what it has meant in their lives (see, for example, Higgins, 1994). A notable example is a whole volume of poetry, drawings and other writings collated by Scottish Women’s Aid (undated). These could be

20 Children’s Perspectives on Domestic Violence

regarded as just as much a resource for those wanting to learn about children’s experiences of living with violence as more formal research outputs. Indeed, child workers’ recognition that children can express very powerful views on these issues was influential in reinforcing the present authors’ wish to pursue research ideas in this field, as will be explained in the next chapter. TALKING TO GENERAL POPULATIONS OF CHILDREN AND YOUNG PEOPLE ABOUT DOMESTIC VIOLENCE A related question is whether we can talk to general populations of children about domestic violence. NCH Action for Children (undated), in its Family Forum consultation with 250 children and young people and 1000 parents, conducted in 1997, found that children volunteered the information that they were greatly concerned about family violence, which parents in the same survey agreed was often a secret. Half the young respondents did not know where to turn for help if there was violence at home; their parents were even less sure. Teenagers who were consulted about council services in Newham similarly raised their own questions as to whether the council was encountering increasing degrees of all forms of abuse, including emotional abuse (Students from Sarah Bonnell and Brampton Manor Schools, 1997). The only study before ours to initiate talking in any depth to a general population of young people about gendered violence in this country consisted of ten focus group discussions and a survey of 2039 young people in Scotland and Northern England, mainly aged between 14 and 21 (Burton and Kitzinger, 1998). Ranging wider than domestic violence, the study sought to ascertain the extent to which violence against women was viewed as acceptable. Amongst young men, one in five considered that abuse/violence was sometimes ‘OK’, rising to almost one in four if the woman had ‘slept with someone else’ (p. 1). (Young women were only about half as likely to think this.) Our findings (see Chapter 3, this volume) make an interesting comparison. One in five young men in the Burton and Kitzinger study also condoned marital rape, again with figures for young women very much lower. Participants in the focus groups welcomed the opportunity to talk about sex, relationships and violence and wanted to discuss such issues in depth, not just to be told what was right or wrong. They also welcomed the idea of campaigns involving young people. (Again, compare our finding in Chapter 3 that young people want to be given more information in school and to be actively involved in discussion.) It is, if anything (and contrary to what might be assumed), in some ways more worrying to be talking to general populations of children about domestic violence than to be talking to well-supported children who have actually lived with violence but who are now in safety and in touch with appropriate support services. This is because some of the former may have hidden experiences that they have never yet disclosed (see below and Chapter 2 and 3, this volume). Nevertheless, provided that adequate preparations are made (including with relevant adults, such as teachers) and supports put in place for those who may need them, work to date has confirmed that research can open up the topic of gendered violence

Children in Their Own Issue: A Shift of Approach 21 with children and young people, who make an enormously important contribution to potential developments in policy and practice by their ability and willingness to discuss it. CONCLUSION Over the course of the past decade, thinking has shifted considerably as to whether it is possible or desirable to talk to children and young people about their experiences of living with domestic violence. We now know, both from practice and research experience, that this is perfectly possible, provided communication is sensitive and age appropriate. The next chapter will chart our approach to conducting a major research study that built on this recognition. NOTES 1. The children whose experiences form the central focus of Chapters 4 to 8 of this book have all lived with the commonest form of domestic violence: male-on-female violence or what in Canada would be called ‘woman abuse’. By ‘domestic violence’ we mean the physical, mental, emotional and/or sexual abuse of a woman by her partner or ex-partner. Statistically, the perpetrator is usually male, although there is also violence in a proportion of same-sex relationships and, of course, this is also harmful for children where it occurs. Though women can be abusive towards their partners, women’s behaviour is seldom as dangerous or frightening as that of violent men (Mirrlees-Black, 1999) and it is important to separate out violence used in self-protection from unprovoked attacks. Furthermore, women’s violence has never been socially condoned, as has the violent control of women by men over the centuries. Consequently, this book is grounded in a gendered understanding of violence in intimate relationships and, where it focuses on children’s experiences, takes men’s violence against women as its theme.

2

Researching with Children on a Sensitive Topic

The research on which this book draws (see also Mullender et al., 2000) was based chiefly on asking children about their own understandings and experiences of domestic violence. The shift this represents in social attitudes towards children – in taking their views more seriously (see Chapter 1) – was summed up by some of the children who helped to pilot our research. They felt their statements would not count because they were ‘just something that children think’ and they had to be reassured that this was very far from the case. Their fears bear testimony to an ‘anti-child bias’ in our society (Alderson, 1995, p. 79), of which children themselves are all too aware. It can only be countered in social science research by an overt recognition that children’s own perceptions and actions in all areas of their lives deserve separate study if existing gaps in our understanding are to be filled. THE BACKGROUND As was mentioned in Chapter 1, the project reported here built on two earlier studies. The first of these was an evaluation of children’s work in a single refuge where considerable developmental work had taken place (Kelly, 1994a) and the second a telephone survey of all women’s refuges in England, encompassing also individual and group interviews with children, their mothers and children’s workers in a sample of refuges, funded by the Women’s Aid Federation of England Trust (Hague et al., 1996; Mullender et al., 1998). Although it formed only one aspect of these studies, direct contact with children confirmed that they were well able to talk about their experiences, given a sensitively designed approach. They described, for example, the disruption of moving home and school, often several times as their mothers fled violence, the security and support they had found in the refuge, and also some of the more difficult things such as having to learn to live with many other people and worrying about the future. Following on from that work, the research team, now slightly enlarged to include two Asian researchers, was inspired to attempt a larger-scale project based centrally upon the views of children and young people. It was clear that hearing from children about living with domestic violence could constitute an important way of informing a more coherent and appropriate response to their needs since they would be able to offer insights unavailable to most adults. It also seemed important to learn from a general population of children about their attitudes to violence in the home. Funding for the work was sought through an appropriate Research Programme of the Economic and Social Research Council

Researching with Children on a Sensitive Topic 23 (ESRC), the major funder of social science research in the UK, entitled ‘Children 5–16: Growing into the 21st Century’. In this programme 22 different projects shared the common theme of looking at children as social actors, focusing on children’s experiences of and responses to contemporary society, with the aim of drawing out implications for policy and practice. The rationale behind the programme was that, whilst recognizing diversity amongst children, it is possible to conceptualize them as a population group with important things to say about the circumstances of their own lives in their family, community and environment. They have an influence on society as well as being influenced by it (in sociological terms, they have ‘agency’) and are not simply the passive constructs or observers of an adult-dominated world. If children are treated as the primary unit of analysis, a whole new perspective on every area of social change opens up, with a different cross-section through family relationships and social networks, the physical environment, the economy, policies and services, and even our sense of time. This perspective could usefully inform policies aimed at improving the quality of life for all children, and for specific groups, if we listen carefully enough to their own experiences of and responses to relevant social circumstances. Indeed, the extent to which a society listens to its children is a core social indicator. Since children do not necessarily compartmentalize their lives along the lines we expect, a multidisciplinary, multi-project programme was needed to shed new light on how they regard the changing conditions of childhood and of their everyday lives. A key aim of the programme was to hear the opinions and experiences of a wide range of children, in their own words, against a background where both the Children Act 1989 and the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child require statutory authorities to accord children the right to express their views (see Chapter 1). The decision to select middle childhood, the years of compulsory education, for detailed study was taken because far less published work had previously focused on this period than on infancy or youth (though see Borland et al., 1998, for one example). The project reported here was the only one on domestic violence in the Children 5–16 Programme, although two others within a stream on ‘Children and Household Change’ considered children’s experiences of divorce and its aftermath. Ours was the first competitively funded study in the UK to be focused on children’s own views of domestic violence. It ran from 1996 to 1999, with research sites centred on the Universities of Bristol, Durham and North London, and with co-ordination from the University of Warwick.

THE STUDY THEORETICAL UNDERPINNINGS An anti-oppressive research praxis was attempted. Abused women and their children were treated with respect and, as outlined above, were viewed as having agency in their own lives, not as passive victims, despite the distressing and

24 Children’s Perspectives on Domestic Violence

sometimes terrifying experiences through which they had lived. The research team was multicultural and strove to be both ethnically sensitive and anti-racist in its approach. The overall approach to conceptualizing children was probably closest to James et al.’s (1998) model of the ‘social structural child’ (see also Morrow and Richards, 1996). We did not perceive children as ‘socially developing’ and hence as less than competent or trustworthy (as briefly discussed in the last chapter); or as ‘socially constructed’ if this means that everything that happens to them, including abuse, may be excused as culturally relative; or as inhabiting their own, unknowable world; or as ‘adult’, as if they were only part of an adult-centred world with no distinguishable perceptions, experiences or social status of their own. And, though we do consider that children are discriminated against in many ways in contemporary Western society, we do not categorize them as a homogeneous ‘minority group’ in a way that glosses over the differences between children and between the contexts in which they live. Rather, we see them as a diverse body of social actors with their own varying levels of competence and their own ways of communicating. Though we planned to use questionnaire and interview techniques, we aimed do so as participatively as possible, making our communication child-centred and age-appropriate as a part, not just of our research process, but of our research ethics (Thomas and O’Kane, 1998). The team’s understanding of domestic violence was theorized from feminist standpoints (as demonstrated in the authors’ earlier work: Kelly, 1988; Mullender, 1996; Hague and Malos, 1998) and drew upon feminist epistemological approaches and research methods (see, for example, Alcott and Potter, 1993; Harding, 1987; Kelly, 1988; Maynard and Purvis, 1994; Nielsen, 1990; Stanley and Wise, 1993), as well as upon its own past practice in domestic violence research (Hague et al., 1996). Close links were maintained throughout the study period with the Women’s Aid Federation of England and other women’s services. As mentioned in Chapter 1, the gender implications of girls’ and boys’ responses about men’s and women’s behaviour were carefully considered in the way data were collected and later analysed (and proved to lead to some of the most important findings). The research team also pursued a feminist commitment to collective working in its own process. This proved enormously helpful in navigating the complexities of collaborative work across four universities and as many background disciplines. Meetings, telephone conferences and electronic communication were all used to ensure thorough discussion of the substantive and methodological issues raised by the research and to resolve ethical and practical dilemmas. AIMS The primary themes of the particular research study reported in this volume were children’s general understandings and perceptions of domestic violence – including whether they saw it as affecting children, who they saw as responsible for it, and what they thought should be done – and, more specifically, the need to learn

Researching with Children on a Sensitive Topic 25 from children who had lived with domestic violence about how they had coped with it and what they considered to be the most helpful forms of response. This latter point included building on children’s agency in the situation and not treating them as passive victims. The specific objectives were twofold, linked to the two phases of the project. First, the study aimed to discover what a general population of children knew about domestic violence and what sense they made of it. Second, in respect of children known to have lived in situations where their mothers had been abused, we aimed to answer the following research questions: • How do children make sense of the experience of living with domestic violence? • What coping strategies do they use? • What help do they consider would meet their needs and build on their coping strategies? • What help do they currently get? • How do children and young people consider it could be improved?

METHODS In order to meet these aims, the research combined quantitative and qualitative methods and was conducted in two phases. In Phase I of the study, 1395 children and young people aged 8 to 16 in school settings (five junior and seven senior) in three areas of England encompassing urban and rural settings completed a questionnaire about what they knew and thought about domestic violence. Phase II was a more detailed study of a smaller sample of 54 children, interviewed individually and in groups, who were known to have lived with violence against their mothers. The researchers explored with the children and young people their views and feelings about their experiences, the coping strategies they had adopted while living through the violent situations, and ideas on the support they thought would have been most helpful to them. The groups were held after the individual interviews and the discussion within them was framed around themes that had emerged from the interviews. In addition, 24 mothers and 14 professionals were interviewed about children in the qualitative sample.

SAMPLING Samples for both phases of the work were drawn from contrasting parts of the country, both in socio-economic terms and in relation to urban/rural contrasts. The research sites were in London, the north-east and the south-west of England. There were disabled children in both samples (see Table 3.3 in Chapter 3, and also Chapter 4) and the researchers in the qualitative phase of the work went to great lengths to ensure that children with speech problems or learning difficulties could trust them and feel that they had made themselves understood. In one case, this

26 Children’s Perspectives on Domestic Violence

was achieved by spending several hours together with a 13-year-old girl with Down’s Syndrome before the interview started. The researcher noted: After I’d been around the house for several hours, we found it much easier to communicate because of her getting used to my voice and me getting used to hers. (Research notes)

In another, an interview schedule designed for a younger age group was used where three boys in the same South Asian family had become virtually selectively mute. It also helped on some occasions to use mother tongues where children with speech and language problems that seemed to have developed as a result of living with the violence were unwilling to converse in English. A boy with severe hearing loss chose to have his mother present during the first interview to ensure he could understand what he was asked though, in fact, he experienced no difficulties. These are all examples of the lengths the researchers, and the process of research design, went to to ensure that disabled children were not excluded from the study and they were remarkably successful in helping children feel able to talk, even where their mothers had doubted that this would happen because their children had become monosyllabic at school or with other professionals. A gentle and slow interview, lasting over two hours in total, including many breaks, also allowed a very shy 13-year-old South Asian girl to participate, even though she started off by pulling her sweater over her head and covering her face with her hands. The decision to set 8 years of age as the minimum age to participate in both phases of this particular study was taken for research-related reasons (James et al., 1998) after discussion with the children who piloted the questionnaire. Not only was reading ability a factor, but young people of various ages in the pilot suggested that 8 years old would be a good starting point since children of this age would have the maturity and comprehension to deal with the issues coherently. To exclude such children as too young, they suggested, would patronize them and mean that important information would be lost. It was also decided that the younger children (those of primary school age) needed their own, ageappropriate version of the questionnaire and the opportunity to have the questions read to them and their answers written down if they found this too difficult in the space of one lesson. It was a particular aim of the team not to exclude younger or less bright children (Costley, 2000, and see Chapter 1, this volume) and not to have teachers making this kind of selection in advance either. There were usually two researchers present in the class and available to offer practical support. A sample of 1200 to 1500 children was planned for Phase I and, in common with many research studies involving general populations in the middle years of childhood, it was decided to recruit the children through their schools. The complexities inherent in the then recent move towards local autonomy for schools meant that, in place of the one-off decision to participate that might at one time have been taken at local education authority level, the research team had to

Researching with Children on a Sensitive Topic 27 negotiate access with each school individually. A letter was sent to selected school heads in the three parts of the country concerned, outlining the project, its standing within a prestigious national research programme, and the research team’s prior experience. This was followed by telephone contact and, where sufficient interest was shown, a preliminary meeting with relevant staff. Although it was very complicated and time-consuming to recruit, the desired sample was achieved, with 1395 children participating in Phase I. There was no overlap between the Phase I and Phase II samples. For reasons of confidentiality and safety, the researchers had made no attempt to identify which children in the schools’ sample had lived with domestic violence so they could not funnel such children through into Phase II. Rather, children to be interviewed were accessed through inter-agency domestic violence forums, Women’s Aid groups, women’s support groups, family centres and statutory organisations providing services for abused women and their children. Making contact via agencies was considered to be important, because the researchers did not want to approach families who did not have supports in place in the event that the research contact proved to be in any way distressing for the children. However, it emerged as enormously time-consuming to work through the complex layers of consent and practical co-operation needed from agency management structures, individual workers, mothers and then individual children. Another obstacle to obtaining a sample was that the majority of children resident in refuges in the research areas during the period of the study were too young to be interviewed. (This was partly to be expected, given the age profile in refuges – see Hague et al., 1996 – but was exaggerated at this time.) It had been anticipated that boys might be harder to recruit to the sample because they might not want to talk about their feelings but this turned out not to be so. Boys were just as willing to be interviewed as girls and, in many cases, talked very openly about their experiences. Indeed, mothers were far more often an obstacle to research access than children themselves, fearing that interviews would be upsetting for children (see Chapters 5 and 7 on mothers’ general underestimation of children’s desire to talk). The sample eventually achieved for Phase II after attempts lasting well over a year, 45 children and a further 9 in groups, was about half what had been hoped for but it did meet the parameters of a purposive sample in that the children were of both sexes and from diverse ethnic and social backgrounds, ages, abilities and areas. Seven had disabilities, two of which (Down’s Syndrome and hearing loss) might have affected the interview process. The resultant interviews produced some very interesting and useful material about what had been witnessed and the impact it had had. As planned, no more than half of the sample came through refuges, thus avoiding a bias which has been built into much domestic violence research in the past simply because of ease of access to an otherwise hidden population. The research team is aware that the most distressed and fearful children are likely to have been excluded from the sample, through their own or their mothers’ choice that they should not participate, so that some of the worst experiences may not have been described. This was ethically

28 Children’s Perspectives on Domestic Violence

inevitable and must be allowed for when reading the results, although these are shocking enough. Families with more than one child were sought where possible, the earlier study by the research team (Hague et al., 1996) having shown that siblings often have markedly different experiences of and reactions to the same set of events and their aftermath. Recruiting sibling groups also helped to ensure an age range. Care was taken in both phases of the research to include ethnically and culturally diverse voices because there is so little in the domestic violence literature on the needs of minority ethnic children (see Imam, 1994). In Phase I, this was achieved by approaching some schools that were known to have very mixed student groups. In Phase II, it was decided to have three sub-samples of children, two of diverse ethnicity in contrasting parts of the country, and one black (see Chapter 6 for a fuller discussion of the latter). The work of obtaining a separate sample of black children proved to be much more complex even than had been anticipated. Intensive contact with 35 agencies over a period of many months by two members of the research team was needed to secure a sample of 14 children (instead of the target of 30). Difficulties chiefly arose because the agencies concerned were even more overstretched than those contacted for the general sample (see below), with insecure funding leading to temporary or permanent closures of projects, staff leaving part way through negotiations, and so on. In the event, most of the 14 children contacted were of South Asian origin (two were from south-east Asia) which, though it did not achieve the intended diversity in the sub-sample (though this was possible in the study overall), does mean that interesting things can be said about the lives and perceptions of a group of children of sufficient size and commonality to allow shared themes to emerge. They were tracked as for the general sample (see below), but with a view to the possibility of identifying any additional relevant factors in their lives such as issues relating to culture, community and family, as well as experiences of racial abuse and harassment. The specific focus of South Asian researchers with appropriate language skills and community involvement made it possible to gain access to experiences that are not typically given sufficient attention and which have not been fully reported elsewhere in the literature. ETHICAL CONCERNS One of the issues that most concerned the research team in its earliest days was the ethics of talking to children about such a sensitive topic as domestic violence. We decided to think about relevant ethical issues in both phases of the research under three headings: consent, confidentiality and child protection. The latter issue extended beyond the normal statutory concerns into thinking about possible harm that might be inflicted by the research process itself, if not properly thought through. It was consequently broken down into three sub-issues: arrangements for disclosure, distress and danger. Whereas disclosures and distress are referred to constantly in the literature covering the ethics of research with children,

Researching with Children on a Sensitive Topic 29 danger is an issue more specific to work on domestic violence. In this context, any ill-advised practice or research intervention can inadvertently threaten the safety of women and children escaping violence if, for example, their abuser finds out about and feels threatened by their participation or if their confidentiality is inadvertently breached. These ‘three Cs and three Ds’ provided a handy mnemonic which could be applied in all research team discussions, and in access negotiations, thus ensuring that ethical dilemmas were fully explored at all stages. Thomas and O’Kane (1998) suggest that all of what we refer to here as ‘the three C’s’ are made more complicated where children are concerned by the power dynamics between them and adults. Adults are likely to become involved in questions of consent, carers may expect children not to have wholly confidential private lives, and there are particular legal and policy requirements concerning child protection that differ from the protection of vulnerable adults. Thus all three issues need particularly careful consideration. CONSENT The decisions the present research team reached were that adult consent should be sought before children were approached to give their own consent, not only because of the sensitivity of domestic violence as a topic but for the essentially practical reason that children would need to be accessed through their schools and families. The research project was clearly explained to both the adults and children concerned. In light of the complexity of negotiating with every school individually, it was decided to leave it to the head to determine the number of levels of consent that would be seen as required. Some heads felt it necessary to consult with governors, some involved the whole staff group or the teachers of relevant classes, some asked parents’ permission, ar any combination of these. The schools that decided not to participate gave a whole range of reasons, including OFSTED inspections, exams and, in some cases, explicit unease about the topic. The research team was aware that the process of seeking access gave a number of powerful adults the opportunity to silence children by ruling them out of the research but, as this phase of the research constituted a large-scale quantitative survey intended to represent all children in the relevant age group, we concluded that, provided there was no bias in the type of schools or children that were excluded, the children we did recruit would speak for all their peers. Once the researchers had gained access to the classroom, the children’s own individual involvement was sought by giving a clear explanation of the research and its purpose and by taking particular care to ensure that children knew they did not have to participate or to answer all the questions (see section on piloting, below). The children in the schools-based survey were thus accorded at least ‘informed dissent’ (Morrow and Richards, 1996, p. 101), made real by being given alternative things to do, as well as tasks for those who finished more quickly (drawing on the back of the questionnaire, reading a book).

30 Children’s Perspectives on Domestic Violence

Children at home, in the qualitative phase of the research, had a more active ‘informed consent’ in that their mothers asked them individually whether they would like to participate before inviting the researchers to their homes. The children also had a further ‘informed dissent’ in that they could still change their minds at any point and not be interviewed. This was checked at various stages before and during the interviews. A small number did decline to be interviewed. One mixed-race1 boy was receiving considerable police attention at the time and it was also unclear whether his mother had fully checked that he was in agreement. Two sisters had just returned from witnessing quite serious violence between family members in Africa and, now that they were back, preferred to put it behind them and not talk about it. A couple of boys had forgotten the researcher was coming and gone out, but agreed to the interview when they got home. Other young people chose to exercise a different kind of control over the interview process, for example by deciding where it would be quiet or whether they would agree to be tape-recorded (see Chapter 6). In the home context, it was decided to make the first approach to children through their mothers because we considered it vital not to usurp the right of the women concerned to decide what would be safe or harmful for their children. The women in question had themselves only recently become free of the power and control of their abusers and were newly established as the heads of their households (Bilinkoff, 1995). Both they and their children were often still having to observe very real precautions in order to remain safe. We assumed that they would want to assure themselves and their children that we had no connection with their abusers. We therefore decided to ask mothers for access to talk to their children, but not for a proxy consent to conduct the research interview, which would involve asking the child separately. The reverse would also apply, in that neither the child’s mother nor any key professionals in their lives would be interviewed unless the child agreed to this and only then would that adult’s consent be obtained to be interviewed themselves. Also, the child would be interviewed before the adult so that they could see that their views were not an afterthought but were particularly valued by the researchers. (Practicalities occasionally intervened, for example in one case where the children had not yet returned home when the researcher arrived and their mother was interviewed in the meantime.) Children were also told that their mothers were not being seen to check up on what they themselves had said. They were interviewed without their mothers present, so that they could talk freely, except where the child chose otherwise. The researcher always checked that the child was prepared to talk to her and that he or she freely agreed to be tape-recorded. The children in the South Asian subsample did not give permission to be tape-recorded and generally demanded a particularly high level of confidentiality. Detailed notes were kept instead. The children chose names for themselves so that their real names did not have to appear, even in the researchers’ field notes. With these safeguards in place, they did talk freely to their South Asian interviewers, who they felt would understand what they were saying, for example about family and community relationships (see Chapter 6). All children were told that the purpose of the interviews was to try and ‘make things better for other children’.

Researching with Children on a Sensitive Topic 31 For the group interviews, consent was once again complex, involving the refuge staff, the children’s mothers and the children themselves all being in agreement. The refuge children’s workers helped to explain the research in advance, and this was also done by the interviewer at the start of the group to ensure that the children’s consent was fully informed. The usual ‘what, why, who, how’ information about the study was covered, in an age-appropriate way. Children were told that the research was to find out what children think about domestic violence and how they cope with it, that it was hoped the findings would be useful for other children in the future and to their mums and also to refuges, that the researchers were from four universities working in three different parts of the country and that they were women who worked very closely with Women’s Aid refuges and with other community-based women’s services. The planned conduct of the group was also explained to those involved. The children’s agreement to participate and to be tape-recorded was again confirmed at the start of the group. They were told that their names would not be used and that the tape would not be played back to their mothers or the refuge workers. Their permission was obtained to quote from what they said in writing up the research but in a disguised way, without using their names. They did not have to share anything they did not want to in the group; for example, they need not talk about what had happened to them and their mum personally, unless they wanted to, because the discussion would mainly be more general than that.

CONFIDENTIALITY AND CHILD PROTECTION We offered confidentiality within the familiar parameters of any disclosures of current risk or harm to the child or others needing to be shared with the appropriate authorities. Some researchers have moved beyond this into offering children complete confidentiality, only to be broken with their agreement (Butler and Williamson, 1994; Thomas and O’Kane, 1998; see fuller discussion in Chapter 1, this volume). However, our research focused so directly on violence and abuse, and the overlap between woman abuse and child abuse is so high (Edleson, 1999; Farmer and Owen, 1995; Goddard and Hiller, 1993; Hester and Pearson, 1998), with dangers continuing in the post-separation phase (Hester and Radford, 1996; Radford et al., 1999), that it was considered essential to put measures in place for potential disclosures. Any child protection issue would be handled through the school’s normal procedures if it occurred in Phase I of the research.2 In Phase II, the matter would be brought to the full research team to decide, in conjunction with the child and the child’s mother if at all possible (though not to the point of ignoring real concerns), whether it needed to be referred onwards. In the event, there were no fresh disclosures of abuse, although safety levels were checked with children and their mothers in two or three instances where the perpetrator appeared to be on the scene (see above). In one case, the researcher reached the point of considering making a child protection referral but did not need to do so as a legal adviser passed on all the information to the relevant authorities.

32 Children’s Perspectives on Domestic Violence

DISTRESS AND DAMAGE The researchers determined that every possible measure would be taken to ensure that the research itself was not unreasonably distressing or in any way damaging. In Phase I, the issue of support for pupils who might become distressed or want to disclose something was carefully considered and it was decided to handle it in three ways. First, the role of the children’s teachers, both during and after the research visits, was recognized and they were offered resources based on training materials developed by a group within the research team,3 to learn more about domestic violence, together with training on request. Second, the research team members would remain available in the school for a time after the completion of the questionnaires, and would explain that they would be doing so, in case any child wanted to talk to them individually. Third, all participating children would be given a ChildLine contact leaflet to keep, which contained the freephone number. ChildLine was regarded as the most appropriate support agency to recommend because it operates a dedicated, confidential helpline for children, can be contacted by children direct without gatekeeping by adults in whom they may not want to confide, has had previous experience of dealing appropriately with calls about domestic abuse (MacLeod, 1996), and can also deal with any other issues that may be triggered for children as a result of completing research questionnaires. It would not have been appropriate within research boundaries for the research team itself to act in this open-ended support role, despite including three qualified social workers and individuals with child care, children’s work and youthwork experience. As well as avoiding a blurring of roles, this was because there was no way of remaining actively available to the children or of operating in a professionally supported environment while so doing. The team was conscious, in planning to distribute the ChildLine leaflets, that only a proportion of calls get through to that agency because demand outstrips the available supply of lines, but there is reason to believe that children do persist with their calls (Epstein and Keep, 1995) and this remained the most suitable alternative, particularly when backed up by teacher and more limited researcher availability. Children were encouraged to take the leaflet away with them and, using a strategy devised in a previous project (Kelly et al., 1991), were told that, whilst they might never need it, a friend of theirs might. Not all did, however, with more leaflets left behind by older groups than by younger. In Phase II, the possibility of children becoming distressed was a matter for individual researchers to handle. Children were always put at their ease through the creation of a trusting atmosphere and sharing of full information about the research. All research team members who undertook these interviews were mature women with relevant professional and research experience and a sensitive manner. They were in a position to offer referral to helping agencies if needed. Also, as with any research interview, they would pause if the child or young person being interviewed became upset or overcome with shyness, and perhaps suspend the interview for a time, only resuming when the interviewee was calmer and able to make a clear decision to do so. Interview closures were carefully handled. Researchers did not just rush off but might stay for a while and chat, or

Researching with Children on a Sensitive Topic 33 look at or play with toys. If appropriate, they might telephone next day to check that all was well. One 14-year-old boy actually chose to complete an interview despite being in tears for much of the time because he really wanted to talk about his experiences. This was his free choice and he was given several opportunities to stop, which he declined because he felt he had important messages to share. The harm involved in silencing him could have been threefold: denying him a voice, denying him the opportunity to try and help others, and denying him the catharsis involved in ventilating his feelings. He was above all concerned that other people should know what he had lived through. Also, he had a most sensitive interviewer with a social work qualification, considerable experience of direct work with young people, and many years’ research experience. She did not cross the boundary into offering counselling or therapy (Mahon et al., 1996), but she was well equipped to empower the young person concerned to make a decision he felt comfortable with about continuing the interview and she was able to empathize with his distress without being ‘fazed’ by it into a precipitate decision to terminate the interview. At the same time, she was making a judgement that the young man concerned was ‘Gillick competent’ to make this decision about his own wellbeing (Alderson, 1995 and see Chapter 1). At the end of the interview, and by phone next day, she again checked that the young man felt OK and that he was happy for his interview transcript to be included with the others for analysis. This young man was re-interviewed in subsequent stages of the research when he stated that he was pleased he had taken part. Other young people, too, gave evidence of having found the interviews a productive experience which had been appropriately handled and had caused them no ill effects. At the same time that some children found the interview process sometimes upsetting because it re-awoke painful memories, others were keen to talk to the researchers. One 15-year-old girl made a special request to be included when she heard about the study through her youth club. A 6-year-old South Asian girl, too young to be included in the sample, did not want to be left out and was asked to draw and write something for the interviewer who was talking to her 9-year-old sister. Both sisters asked the interviewer lots of questions about herself and thanked her warmly for coming. DANGER This issue was handled by attempting to select only children for the sample who were not living in continuing danger, by choosing families who had current supports in place, and by being in a position to offer contact details of relevant agencies if needed. In order not to compromise their safety, as far as could possibly be known the children in the sample were in families no longer living with or in current danger from the abuser. There were a small number of reconciliations or resumptions of contact over the period of the research, which meant that the perpetrator was back on the scene, and contact had continued throughout in other cases. In one of these, the child’s mother had just come through a long drawn-out criminal prosecution of the abuser for a repeat attack against her, in the context

34 Children’s Perspectives on Domestic Violence

of his contact with their daughter. Safety was not at issue by the time of the research, but the situation was still emotionally fraught for the girl concerned, which came through in the interview content (see Chapter 5, for example). Also, one teenager who was still living with both parents particularly asked to be interviewed by one of the researchers at a youth centre which she attended and where she had heard that other interviews would be taking place. In all these cases, it was considered safe to proceed with the interviews. One family was dropped from the sample because an incident involving the perpetrator occurred outside their house. Although the woman concerned reported satisfactory assistance from the police, had current social services involvement and felt reasonably confident that she and the children were safe, she agreed with the interviewer that it was best not to proceed since there were still unresolved issues and possibly an ongoing risk. In all the more complex cases, the research team held full discussions about how to proceed and made the safety of the women and children concerned their first concern. PREPARATORY WORK WITH WOMEN Members of the research team undertook preliminary consultation on two occasions with women who had considerable experience of working with children who had lived with domestic violence. This was never seen as an alternative to talking to children directly, but was viewed as an additional precaution taken because of the sensitivities and dangers inherent in situations of domestic violence and as part of clarifying our initial thinking about the three Ds (see above) and whether we might inadvertently do more harm than good through our research (Alderson, 1995). In the very earliest stages of planning the project, we attended a national meeting of Women’s Aid children’s workers (convened by WAFE’s then National Children’s Officer who was also consultant to our project), at which we outlined the research proposal and sought suggestions about both content and process. The children’s workers were very encouraging about the viability and importance of the proposed study, particularly the qualititative phase. From their own extensive experience of listening to children, they assured us that children would be quite prepared to talk about the violence. They considered it crucially important to hear the voices of children and to let this be as wide-ranging as possible. The research would inevitably collect valuable information and they hoped this could be channelled into indications for practice. Issues of trust, consent and confidentiality were emphasized. Mothers, and children’s workers for those in refuges, could help support children both before and after the interview. Later, prior to the second (qualitative) phase of the research, two of the researchers ran a workshop at the Women’s Aid Federation of England annual conference, part of which was devoted to asking participants for their ideas on conducting the research. Again, they confirmed our view that it would be important to build rapport and trust, allowing ample time and never forcing any issue in the interviews. Mothers would need to be somewhere on hand, with

Researching with Children on a Sensitive Topic 35 parameters of confidentiality made very clear both to the children and their mothers. Older children and young people were likely to find a one-to-one interview most enabling. They might also respond to keeping a notebook. Younger ones might need some non-verbal communication methods. Safety issues were emphasized for all participants, including checking whether it felt safe to talk about what had happened. The research team was encouraged by these sessions with highly experienced workers to proceed with interviewing children on the topic of domestic violence, feeling reassured that the research was unlikely to do more harm than good, provided an appropriately sensitive approach was adopted. DEVELOPMENT AND PILOTING OF RESEARCH INSTRUMENTS WITH CHILDREN We endeavoured to work with children at all stages of research design. Our questionnaires were developed in conjunction with groups of children, who also helped to draw out the themes for the in-depth interviews. Thus we were open to children’s own agendas and understandings (Thomas and O’Kane, 1998). The questionnaires and interview schedules were piloted both with individuals and with groups of children and young people, the latter including both mixed ethnicity and Asian-only groups. It proved enormously valuable to involve children and young people very fully at this early stage of the work. They were able to point out any draft questions they did not understand and one or two non sequiturs or awkwardnesses in the ordering of questions which confused them. For example, some questions which asked respondents to ‘tick one box only’ caused difficulty because those completing the pilot thought that some children might need more than one choice fully to represent their views or experiences. Similarly, a few questions needed to ask more specifically what the respondent would do first, not just what they would do, because, over time, they might take a number of actions. Older children liked the tick-box lay-out of the closed questions because it resembled quizzes in popular magazines (for example, we asked ‘How many women do you think are victims of domestic violence?’, with six possible responses to choose from, from ‘1 in 2’ to ‘1 in 500’). The research team had first thought of seeking children’s own definitions of domestic violence and then using this as the baseline for subsequent answers so as to avoid directing their perceptions. However, the children in the pilot exercise perceived this as leaving them without a definition of what we really meant. Consequently, it was decided to ask for children’s own ideas on one page and then, on turning over to the next page, to include a commonly accepted definition as the basis for later answers. This greatly improved the questionnaire since it gave a point of comparison for all children’s level of understanding without stifling their own contribution. For the younger children, the definition we offered built on children’s published accounts in earlier publications (e.g. Higgins, 1994) and was worded:

36 Children’s Perspectives on Domestic Violence Some children have told us that domestic violence means: ‘When your dad hits your mum and makes her cry’ ‘When your dad shouts, makes everyone frightened, and hurts your mum’.

For the older children, it simply read: The next set of questions is about domestic violence which means violence between adults in the home.

In practical terms, it transpired that the typical time taken to complete the first draft of the questionnaire was 20 to 30 minutes but that some children could take up to 40 minutes, thus leaving the quickest ones with a lot of time to fill. The idea emerged of leaving the back page blank for the younger age group and asking children who had finished to do a drawing. These illustrations were later used to throw further light on, and to give presentations about, the research findings. (Older children were asked to read a book if they finished before the others.) Children wanted bigger print in the questionnaire than had been used initially but for it to be printed on both sides of the page so that it did not look too long and put people off before they had started. Even so, it was decided to make cuts after the pilot because children felt the questionnaire was ‘a bit too long’. The research team had not made sufficient allowance for mixed ability classes where, children advised us, some pupils might take the whole lesson to write one sentence, meaning that lots of questionnaires might not have been completed in time. The version of the questionnaire intended for younger children ended up shorter than that for teenagers, allowing for slower reading and writing times, and help was available in completing it if required. (In practice, the younger children took about 15 to 25 minutes to complete their questionnaires.) Children themselves advised on which questions could be left out because they were too confusing, upsetting or ‘no good’. Children in the pilot were also very helpful to us in thinking through how others might feel when they completed the questionnaire. They were sensitive to the fact that some children might have experienced domestic violence at home and thought this might make the child ‘go red, feel awful, think everyone is looking at them’. Or, they might be relieved to find out that it happens to others. Others, too, might be upset by the content, for example being asked what made them unhappy, and the children wanted to know whether anyone would be on hand at the end, and whether the teacher might give an opportunity later on to ask how everyone had found completing the questionnaire, in case anyone had been upset but not shown it: ‘Just gone out to break or something’. Also, the research team learned that they might need to say several times that ‘You don’t have to fill in the questions if you don’t want to’. One of the pilot groups suggested the wording: ‘Remember you don’t have to answer these questions if you don’t want to or if they upset you’. The group also thought it was important to repeat this on the questionnaire, even if it had already been explained at the beginning of the session, because not everyone would pay attention or remember, and others might be frightened of the teacher or the researcher and think they had to answer everything. These were very helpful and sensible responses to the difficulties of obtaining voluntary consent in a school context (Costley, 2000; Solberg, 1996).

Researching with Children on a Sensitive Topic 37 Although the research was only conducted in mainstream schools, the research team was anxious not to exclude any children with a degree of learning difficulty who might have been integrated into the classes visited (Costley, 2000) and, indeed, was aware of the wide range of reading ages present in all schools. The pilot helped us decide that two different, age-appropriate versions of the questionnaire would need to be designed, for 8 to 11 and for 12 to 16-year-olds. It would also be particularly important to allow plenty of time to complete the task, to explain it adequately and to provide support. During the pilot, it became clear that the younger children, particularly, had a tendency to ask for help when a question was not understood or where the whole task was experienced as rather difficult for an individual, who could therefore become excluded if assistance was not given. The research team discussed this issue at length and decided that, with two people present in the room (either two researchers, or one researcher and the class teacher), it would be possible to offer help, even to the level of reading out every question to a child who was struggling and then writing down his or her answers. Explanations would be given, if requested, that stayed within what was written on the questionnaire and did not offer any new material that might influence an answer. It was also evident from the pilot that younger children assumed there would be right and wrong answers (Solberg, 1996), as if the questionnaire was a piece of school work, and wanted to know whether they were ‘doing it right’. This has been previously discussed in terms of consent (see Chapter 1) but struck us, also, as an issue of how much explanation and reassurance needed to be given, both in introducing the task and in answering any questions during it, that what we wanted was children’s own ideas and understanding – there were no ‘right’ answers. Children in one of the pilot groups also pointed out where the team needed to insert ‘If you don’t know, go on to the next question’. The children and young people were extremely helpful to the research team in thinking through the gender implications of Phase I of the research. Both older and younger participants reacted against what they saw as a male-on-female bias in the first draft of the questionnaire. Many of the children involved in the pilot knew that it was mainly men who abused women, but they wanted the questionnaire to include violence in both directions, not because they held simplistic views about mutual fighting (see discussion in Mullender, 1996) but for a whole range of more sophisticated reasons such as knowing that there are social stereotypes and differential impacts and wanting to explore these in their own terms. This helped the research team to develop questions that more subtly recorded the young people’s own views about who does perpetrate the violence/abuse and whether a man hitting a woman is different from a woman hitting a man, rather than appearing to prejudge this. Another point was that the older girls wanted a girls-only section in the questionnaire if there was to be a boys-only one as had originally been intended (to ascertain boys’ attitudes). In the event, neither was included and it was boys’ and girls’ different answers to the same questions that were analysed, thus providing data for comparison. The teenagers in the piloting also helped us decide to include a question about sexuality in the demographic section of the questionnaire, where we asked the secondary-aged children how

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they would define their sexuality, offering the options: ‘heterosexual (straight)’, ‘lesbian/gay’, ‘bisexual’, ‘not sure’ and ‘don’t want to say’. (This question was omitted from the primary-age form.) Young people were ‘cool’ about including such a question and we were more fearful of losing access if parents or schools did not approve but, in the event, this did not happen. Piloting the questionnaires with Asian children revealed a number of inadvertently ethnocentric assumptions underlying the initial draft of the questions and vignettes. First, households might be more complex than had been thought about, so more options were added to cover different family forms and other adults living in the home. Secondly, the team had written a vignette about a young woman with a jealous boyfriend. A group of Asian young women told us that this worked for fictional scenarios that were about other people because everyone knew that other people had boy- and girlfriends. However, direct questions such as ‘Have you ever been hit by a boy/girlfriend’ would be outside some young people’s own experience, either because they were not yet dating or because they came from a non-dating culture. Consequently, only the fictional question was retained. Also, asking children to tick a box best describing their ethnic origin was quite complicated. In the Asian pilot group, some children described themselves by their religion: ‘I’m Muslim’, while a mixed group thought the long list of categories might be confusing, for example the difference between AfricanCaribbean and Black British – which one should someone tick if they felt both applied? In the event, for reasons of practicality, we retained the list with five options (Asian, African-Caribbean, Black British, Mixed Race, White) and added a further question: ‘How do you describe yourself in terms of race, culture or religion?’ Many children did not complete this latter question but it helped reveal diversity since 34 different categories were filled in. One point the team did get right first time was in naming the child in a vignette about violence between parents. We chose a deliberately ambiguous name, ‘Jaz’, in the hope that children of different sexes and ethnic origins would potentially be able to identify with an imagined child of this name, as opposed to seeing it as indicating someone who was definitely male, female, or from a different cultural group. This worked well in piloting where, although not everyone said they knew a child of this name, all could accept it as a real name and no one thought it would sound odd in their own context. It might suggest, for example, someone called Jasmine, Jaswinder or Jazza. The young people who piloted the questionnaire were quite safety conscious. They felt there was a danger of inadvertently suggesting, through the options provided for response or the way a vignette was presented, that children should intervene in situations of domestic violence where this might in fact be dangerous. Children were therefore asked open-ended questions (‘What should Jaz do?’, ‘Who do you think could help Jaz?’), rather than being asked to tick one or more options. In addition to designing and piloting the questionnaires with groups of children, the drafts of the in-depth interview topic guides for Phase II of the research were checked over by the staff of a refuge and were piloted with a small number of children and their mothers. Slight adaptations were made as a result. There was also some bridging between the two phases of the research in that findings from

Researching with Children on a Sensitive Topic 39 Phase I influenced some of the questions in Phase II as, of course, did the team’s earlier research. The research team was struck by the care with which all the pilot groups and individual children who assisted in developing the research tools approached their task. They were thorough, animated, and totally committed to helping. They contributed energy, fun and careful reflection, teasing out sensitive issues in what can be a distressing and demanding topic. PHASE I: THE SCHOOL SURVEY The schools-based survey was undertaken in order to access a broad, general population of children. Age-appropriate questionnaires were administered to 1395 children in classroom settings in twelve schools in contrasting parts of England. Since there is no way of knowing with certainty which children within a classroom population have lived with domestic violence in their own home and which have not, the team had to act on the assumption that within the sample there would be children who had had these experiences and who might or might not previously have talked to someone about them. Appropriate training was offered to teachers, every teacher at participating schools (not just participating teachers) received an information sheet (on the impact of domestic violence on children, its widespread incidence and prevalence, and ways of handling disclosures), and a training pack for every participating school was developed in conjunction with the then WAFE National Children’s Officer who was acting as a consultant to the project. However, teachers were asked not to cover the subject matter in advance, which could have planted ideas in the children’s minds and contaminated the findings. Research team members were equally careful when introducing the questionnaire in class. Questions of consent, confidentiality and child protection were all discussed with the schools (see above). Questionnaires were completed in one period of class time. With the youngest children, the researchers began by asking if anyone knew what a researcher was and what ‘confidentiality’ was. Once a good description of each had been provided by children themselves, they explained that there was a free choice whether to fill in the questionnaire and this was also printed on the front. Children tended to ask a good many questions at the beginning of the session but then settled down and worked hard, clearly being attentive to the explanations given and thinking about what to write. As planned, questions were read out to any child who asked for this and were explained where necessary, but only by rephrasing the question, never by giving any hint as to what to write. Completed questionnaires were handed to the researchers in sealed envelopes. All coding and analysis was undertaken at one research site. Coding frames for open-ended questions were built up using content analysis and subsequently recoded into more inclusive categories for analysis. Coding was checked in a random one in ten of all questionnaires. Analysis was made using SPSS for Windows, and any anomalies checked. Basic frequency counts on a number of

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variables and cross-tabulations were produced. Data is stored at London Metropolitan University and has been deposited in the ESRC Data Archive. Responses to open-ended questions were all transcribed, together with the questionnaire number, age and sex of respondent. PHASE II: THE IN-DEPTH INTERVIEWS Phase II of the research comprised an in-depth study of 54 children known to have lived with domestic violence; 45 were interviewed individually and 9 in groups. The children who were seen individually were members of 25 households. The largest number of siblings individually interviewed was four, with four sets of three and the remainder in singletons or pairs. Where possible, children were tracked from the time of being recruited to the sample through to the end of the study period (up to 18 months), to obtain information on their changing situations and views and to increase validity by making the researcher more familiar to the child and hence more likely to be trusted with accurate information (Rubin, 2000). Wherever contact could be retained (renewed danger might lead women to move suddenly), respondents were interviewed twice, with a telephone contact in between. This always required some effort on the part of the researchers since it was clearly not a priority in the lives of the domestic violence survivors to remain in touch with the team. Some women were still moving on, attempting to remain safe and to rebuild their lives. The London sample, in particular, was hard to keep track of, perhaps because people are more mobile there. Anyone who had returned to the violent relationship was not recontacted, for fear of placing them in danger if the perpetrator discovered that they had been talking to an outsider about his behaviour. For some of the younger children, there was communication through drawing, and all participants were given a notebook in which to record their impressions in any way they wished so that they could discuss these when the interviewer returned. Sadly, the child who made fullest use of the diary mislaid it on having to make an emergency move in order to stay safe; others did not complete or chose not to pass their notebooks back to the researchers. All the children were interviewed in their own homes, following contact with their mothers by letter and then by telephone. Wherever possible, they were seen on their own, in a separate room, unless they chose otherwise. It is important in ensuring validity in qualitative research that respondents should feel able to talk openly and independently (Mahon et al., 1996), so the context and process of the interviews were very important. The researchers worked hard to put the children at their ease. They emphasized that a child could refuse the interview, could withdraw his or her consent at any time, stop talking at any point, and/or decide not to answer any of the questions. The interviews were never rushed but were lengthy enough to build the child’s trust, again to enhance validity (Rubin, 2000). As has been noted by many researchers with children (e.g. Mahon et al., 1996), it is always impossible to know how far children are impeded by the way they perceive the researchers (adults, authority figures, and so on). Like Williamson and Butler (1997), the interview team used their own

Researching with Children on a Sensitive Topic 41 personal styles to engage the young people, in this case taking a warm, respectful, supportive approach. The team’s backgrounds in social work, youth work, child care, sociology and social policy, and in activism with women and children, helped them to reduce the social distance between themselves and the young people they were interviewing. The interviews followed a semi-structured format, using a prepiloted interview guide. There was a wide range in how forthcoming children and young people were able and chose to be. Some found it difficult to speak, while others talked without stopping. Amongst sibling groups, one child was often more vociferous than the others, with perhaps another who said very little. This may have been a pattern they had developed amongst themselves. As a form of triangulation, and because they can sometimes be a more natural environment for children than individual encounters, two group interviews were held with nine additional children in refuge and aftercare settings. The children were aged 8 to 13 and were from a range of ethnic backgrounds. A quiet space was found to conduct each group. The sessions started with refreshments and then some name games and setting of ground rules, including reconfirming the children’s consent to participate and to be tape-recorded. Agreement was obtained to conduct the group seated and in relative quiet, with an attempt not to interrupt other people while they were speaking, so that voices would be heard on the tape. The group discussion itself was focused around the four key research questions outlined earlier in this chapter, but always in age-appropriate language and bearing in mind children’s shorter concentration spans. The main focuses were what children think about domestic violence (what it is, why it happens), how children cope with it (themselves and other children), what sort of help children need so that they can do the things that help them cope, what other sort of help they need, and how the help they get now could be made better. The interview framework for the groups included a range of sub-questions and possible probes to ensure that roughly comparable ground was covered in each group. At the end, the children were asked whether they wanted to hear the tape played back (which they all did), whether they felt OK, whether they wanted to stay and talk individually, and whether they wanted to see the children’s worker. They were also thanked and given a token parting gift after further refreshments. In addition to talking to children, 24 interviews were conducted with mothers, several of whom were mother to more than one child in the sample. All but one mother of children in the sample were interviewed. (One woman was not up to being interviewed, although she had been willing in principle.) Altogether, the women were mothers to 76 children, 45 of whom were interviewed – at least one in each family. Most of the children who were not interviewed fell outside the parameters of the research because they were either adult or very young. A further 20 interviews were conducted with professionals whom the children considered to have been significant in their lives. This last number was smaller than had been anticipated but one finding of the research was that families who have gone through a period of upheaval, and who have frequently moved around, rarely have clear memories of which agencies workers have come from and often do not remember their names. Hence it was hard to trace a sample of practitioners from what family members (mothers and children) could recall. Also, because

42 Children’s Perspectives on Domestic Violence

professionals in relevant settings work under such pressure themselves, a surprising number were on long-term sick leave with stress-related illnesses or their projects had lost their funding; clearly, people could not be contacted under these circumstances. We also chose to interview only professionals who had been involved directly with the children, which further decreased the sample pool. All interviews were transcribed, coded and analysed using the NUD*IST package. The coding categories began with base data on demographics and whether there had been any contact with statutory agencies and/or women’s organisations. This was followed by a coding for the children that encompassed whether they had left home at any time and the impacts on them of this; whether they had heard/seen/been aware of the violence and the impacts on them of that; whether they attributed blame and, if so, to whom and why; whether their parent(s) had talked to them about the violence; whether they themselves had ever talked to anyone about it and, if so, to whom and with what response (especially whether this had been experienced as helpful); whether anyone had ever helped their mother; what would have helped; what they wanted now; how safe they felt; whether they still saw the perpetrator, how often, under what circumstances, and whether or not this was OK; and what changes there had been in their lives. A separate coding for interviews with the children’s mothers included whether they had tried to prevent the child(ren) from knowing about the abuse and if so how and with what result; whether the man had used the children in any way within his pattern of abuse and if so how and with what result; how the violence had affected the children and whether this had varied between siblings; whether she had talked to the child(ren) about the abuse; whether she had sought help from anywhere, where from and with what results; the impact of the abuse on her ability to care for the children; whether the children still saw the perpetrator and with what impact; and any particular concerns she now had for them. Analysis took place under general themes and then under specific questions for children and mothers, both separately and in combination. Where it had been possible to maintain contact, copies of their own transcripts were offered to individual participants (both to share ownership with them and as a useful way of enhancing validity) but relatively few took up the offer. While it is acknowledged that the samples of children and women are small and cannot be used to arrive at any ‘cause and effect’ conclusions, the resultant interviews were rich in detail and, in Chapters 4 to 7, will offer considerable insight into the impact of domestic violence in children’s lives and their responses to it. CONCLUSION The research study outlined in this book followed the high standards listed by Alderson (1995) for research with children: the children and young people were fully informed about the project in which they were being asked to participate; their consent was not only requested but was renegotiated throughout, thus putting the children as far as possible in charge of participation; their non-abusing parents’ consent was also sought (or, in school, that of those in loco parentis); respondents

Researching with Children on a Sensitive Topic 43 knew that they could refuse to participate in the research or to withdraw from it at any point if they wished to do so, and some did; their confidentiality was respected within the limitations of child protection concerns (although it never became necessary to talk to an outside agency about any child’s safety); and their own views, often in their own words, are being disseminated in this book and through other channels. In a field in which parents, teachers, psychologists and a host of other professionals and academics have been interviewed over the years about the impact on children of living with violence, it is still innovative to request children’s permission before this is done and to raise the children’s own accounts, if anything, above those of the adults who purport to talk for them (Alderson, 1995). Our research with children rather than about them will now be reported in the ensuing chapters. The concepts we employ in our discussion will, as far as possible, be grounded in the way the children and young people talked about their own lives (Williamson and Butler, 1997), as opposed to the adult perspectives which have preoccupied the literature up to now. NOTES 1. The term ‘mixed race’ is used throughout this book because it is the term children most often used to describe themselves. The research team is aware that it is problematic in that, for example, it retains the outmoded concept of ‘race’ and may also be considered discriminatory because it tends to be used to emphasize black and white parentage, as against any other combination. The term ‘dual heritage’ is perhaps more celebratory of the richness of a shared parentage and family background, but is not in such wide-scale use and, certainly, did not form part of the children’s language in either the completion of the questionnaires or the conduct of the in-depth interviews. 2. Children were not asked to indentify themselves in the questionnaire, so such issues would have been the outcome of children choosing to disclose directly to the researchers during the time they spent in the school. 3. These had been developed by the Child and Woman Abuse Studies Unit, when conducting a prevalence study of child sexual abuse in further education colleges (Kelly et al., 1991), and updated for a study done in schools on attitudes to violence against women (Burton et al., 1999).

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What Children Know and Understand about Domestic Violence

Whilst a number of studies had previously begun to explore children’s experiences of and responses to living with domestic violence (see Chapter 1), as far as we know the study reported in this book was the first to ask a general population of children what they knew and thought about the topic. In this chapter, we present the findings of Phase I of the research, the schools survey, which was designed to seek the views of a wide range of children and young people in primary and secondary schools (see Chapter 2 for methodology). By sampling in this way, we knew we would be including some children who had personally lived with domestic violence, along with many who had not. We did not consider it appropriate, under the circumstances of this survey, to try and identify who had or had not had this experience because we were not offering any opportunity for direct follow-up. Instead, we assumed that the experience would be present somewhere in every school and proceeded accordingly: by preparing the staff, working with sensitivity, and leaving ChildLine leaflets with all the children we met. We hoped, too, that having their own lives validated as part of a named, recognised and widespread phenomenon might be reassuring to some children who were living a ‘family secret’ (Peled and Edleson, 1995). A total of 1395 questionnaires were completed in six primary and seven secondary schools in three contrasting parts of the country. The gender balance achieved was good, with 51 per cent of respondents (n = 715) female and 48 per cent (n = 671) male (less than 1 per cent, n = 9, unknown). Of those children and young people who answered the question about ethnicity, 76 per cent were white and 24 per cent came from a range of minority communities (see Table 3.1). There was a deliberate strategy to over-represent minority ethnic children in the sample, in order to ensure that we could make sensible comments about their experiences and not have to discount them because the numbers were too small. The age range across the board was 8 to 16 (40 per cent, 8–11; 60 per cent, 12–16 – see Table 3.2). A total of 89 children reported having a disability (see Table 3.3). This constituted 6 per cent of the total, falling comfortably between the 3 per cent and 16 per cent in 30 years of childhood disability surveys overviewed by Gordon et al. (2000). We can therefore say that disabled children were not excluded from the survey (see Chapters 1 and 2). Analysis of the data included basic frequency counts, with additional analysis to explore variations across age, gender and ethnicity, and the difference it made to children’s responses if they knew someone who had experienced domestic violence. Numbers of 15- and 16-year-olds were lower than other secondary school

What Children Know and Understand about Domestic Violence 45 TABLE 3.1

Ethnicity of sample Female

White Asian Mixed Race Afro-Caribbean Black British African Turkish/Cypriot Total

Male

Total

n

%

n

%

n

%

506 58 33 26 15 19 5 662

37 4 2 2 1 1